SCHOOL BOY 
IN ENGLAND 



AN AMERICAN 

VIEW BY 
JOHN 'C ORB IN 




MDCCCXCVIII 

HARPER &> BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 




TWO COPIES RECEIVED 






Copyright, 1897, by Harphk & Bkothh 
All rights reserved 



TO 

MY FATHER 



PKEFACE 



My first interest in the English 
schools was aroused by living for about 
a year and a half on intimate terras 
with the undergraduates of Oxford. 
The result of English school education, 
it appeared, was to make a man sur- 
prisingly solid in character and at the 
same time surprisingly simple and natu- 
ral. The Oxonian has a firmer knowl- 
edge of himself and of the world of 
men than the Harvard man, and at 
the same time a greater measure of 
the spontaneity and exuberance natu- 
ral to youth. The system which pro- 



PREFACE 

duces such results seemed well worth 
a closer consideration. ; and, being asked 
to prepare a series of articles on life in 
the English schools for Harper's Round 
Table, I undertook the task with en- 
thusiasm. I went to live for a short 
period at Winchester, Eton, and Rugby, 
the schools which, more than any others, 
have contributed to the growth of the 
English educational system. At each 
of these I met and conversed with as 
many of the masters and boys as possi- 
ble, and lost no opportunity of seeing 
their actual life. 

In rewriting the articles which were 
the result of these studies, for publica- 
tion in book form, I have benefited by 
the conversation of " old boys " of both 
English and American schools. In ad- 
dition, I have read the chief books on 
the subject. The main facts as to 
Winchester are to be found in Wyhe- 



PREFACE 

hamica, by Kev. H. C. Adams, M.A., 
and no single volume on the English 
schools contains so much interesting 
and instructive reading. A History of 
Eton College, by H. C. Maxwell Lyte, 
C.B., is scholarly and exhaustive. A 
Day of My Life • or, Every-day Expe- 
riences of Eton, by an Eton Boy 
[George Newton Banks], is a humor- 
ous sketch that will well repay half an 
hour. For Eugby, Stanley's Life of 
Arnold is the work of most value ; 
and those portions of it which bear 
particularly upon education have been 
gathered together, with an instructive 
preface, index, and an interesting bib- 
liography of books on all the public 
schools, in Arnold of Rugby, by T. T. 
Findlay. Great Public Schools, by Vari- 
ous Authors, contains articles of varying 
interest on ten of the leading institu- 
tions, those on Eton (by H. C. Max- 



PREFACE 

well Lyte) and on Rugby (by his Honor 
Judge Hughes, Q.C.) being of especial 
interest. The Life of Sir Rowland Hill, 
E.C.B., etc., by George Birkbeck Hill, 
contains much of interest concerning ed- 
ucation in the first quarter of the pres- 
ent century. Thomas and Matthew Ar- 
nold, and their Influence on Education, 
by Sir Joshua G. Fitch, LL.D., is per- 
haps the most thoughtful and com- 
plete work dealing with the schools 
as institutions. For the sports of the 
public schools, the Badminton Library 
is, of course, the authority. Besides 
these books, the periodicals are rich in 
articles,which may be found by consult- 
ing Poolers Index to Periodical Litera- 
ture. The illustrations are from photo- 
graphs by Richard W. Thomas and the 
firm of Hills & Saunders. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

English Schools 3 

Winchester : 

i. william of wykeham 9 

ii. the college and the houses . . 11 

iii. prefectorial discipline .... 24 

iv. customs and "notions" .... 32 

v. the wykehamist 42 

vi. football 44 

Eton: 

i. winchester and eton 63 

ii. the college 66 

iii. the oppidans .73 

iv. the modern "houses" .... 78 

v. discipline 84 

vi. eton school societies 91 

vii. the eton spirit 96 

viii. relics of eton ltfe 98 

ix. rackets and fives 105 

x. boating 110 

xi. cricket 130 



CONTEXTS 

I. RUGBY AND MODERN EDUCATION . .147 
II. ROWLAND HILL'S GOVERNMENT BY 

CONSTITUTION 150 

III. ARNOLD AND PUBLIC-SCHOOL TRADI- 

TION 160 

IV. ARNOLD AND MODERN EDUCATION . 172 
V. THE SCHOOL-HOUSE AND THE CLOSE . 180 

The Public-schools of To-day: 

i. the great english schools . . . 189 
ii. certain charges against the 

SCHOOLS 190 

iii. the respect due to boyhood . .199 
English and American Schools: 

i. american boys in england . . . 205 
ii. english schools in america . .210 
iii. english ideas in american schools 214 
iv. the importance op secondary ed- 
UCATION ... 220 



ILLUSTEATIONS 



THE BROCAS AND THE BOAT-HOUSES, 
LOOKING TOWARDS WINDSOR CAS- 
TLE Frontispiece 

AT THE ENTRANCE TO CHAMBER 

COURT Facing p. 32 . 

THE CHAPEL CORNER OP CHAMBER 

COURT " 34" 

ONE OF THE CHAMBERS " 36 •'' 

A PREFECT AT HIS " WASHING- STOOL " " 38 ^ 

' ' HORSE - BOXES " AND ' ' WASHING- 
STOOLS " " 40 

A MATCH AT " SIXES " ON MEADS, WIN- 
CHESTER " 50 ^ 

A "HOT" IN "SIXES" AT WINCHES- 
TER " 52 "" 

A "HOUSE" TEAM AT ETON READY 

FOR THE FIELD " 54 ' 

A GROUP OF "HOUSES" — THE CHAP- 
EL IN THE DISTANCE .... " 78 ■* 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE QUADRANGLE, SHOWING LUP- 
TON'S TOWER AND THE found- 
er's STATUE Facing p. 98 

THE LOWER SCHOOL, WITH CARVINGS 

ON THE WINDOW SHUTS AND POSTS " 1 02 

"PASSING" AT THE ACROPOLIS . . " 114 

ETON WINNING THE LADIES' PLATE 

FROM BALLIOL " 128 

THE ETON AND HARROW CRICKET 

MATCH AT LORDS, LONDON . . " 136 

THE CHAPEL AND " SCHOOL - HOUSE " 

AS SEEN FROM THE CLOSE . . 148 

AFTERNOON IN THE CLOSE .... " 180 

A WET DAY IN THE QUADRANGLE . " 184 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS 

The English public schools are not 
what we should call public schools at all 
— that is, you can't go to them without 
paying, and their object is far broader 
than just to teach so much reading, writ- 
ing, and mathematics. A witty English- 
man has said that they are called public 
because they are only for the upper class- 
es, and they are called schools because 
they teach athletics. What we in Amer- 
ica call public schools the English call 
national schools, and only poor children 
go to them. The English public schools 
are not unlike the big American pre- 
paratory schools — Exeter, Andover, St. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, and others. 
But here, again, our terms are likely to 
mislead us. In England, preparatory 
schools are schools that keep boys until 
they are a dozen years old or so, and 
prepare them for the public schools, 
which in turn, perhaps, prepare them 
for the universities. Though the pub- 
lic schools are scarcely farther ad- 
vanced in the studies they teach than 
our preparatory schools, they are of im- 
mensely greater prominence in English 
life. The position they occupy is almost 
as important in English education as 
that of our colleges. To be a public- 
school boy means as much in after-life 
as to be a college man means here. In 
spite of common-sense and reason, a fel- 
low would much rather be able to say, 
I am a Wykehamist, an Etonian, a 
Eugbeian, a Harrovian, a Carthusian, 
as the case may be, than not have any 
4 



ENGLISH SCHOOLS 

place upon which to fix the merits or 
demerits of his early training. With 
the English universities it is very dif- 
ferent. A man may leave Eton or Rug- 
by to go to the Military College at Sand- 
hurst, to go into business, to travel — 
or to do nothing, in fact — and his case is 
easily explained ; but if he wants to be 
sure of passing current among strangers, 
he must at least have been to a public 
school — even if he never passed an ex- 
amination, was flogged every day of 
his life, and expelled at the end of his 
first term. One of the funniest char- 
acters in a very clever play by Mr. 
Arthur Pinero is a pompous old mem- 
ber of Parliament who tries to explain 
away the lack of a public-school educa- 
tion by saying, "The world was my 
public school." 

In the following chapters I shall 
speak of Winchester, Eton, and Rugby, 
5 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

and shall regard them as typical of 
the dozens of public schools in Eng- 
land. The oldest of these three was 
founded long before white men ever 
dreamed of settling in this American 
continent of ours, and the youngest 
was begun when Shakspere was a 
mere lad. Many of their institutions 
and customs are of great antiquity j and 
are very amusing. Yet in the way the 
boys are governed and taught, and in 
the spirit with which they go in for 
athletics, the schools are as modern as 
can be ; and are perhaps even in ad- 
vance of our very progressive American 
institutions of learnins:. 



WINCHESTER 



WINCHESTEK 

I. WILLIAM OF WYKEHAM 

The oldest of all the schools is Win- 
chester. Fellows at Andover some- 
times tell you that their fathers and 
grandfathers went there before them. 
At Winchester this is a common case ; 
and since the corner-stone of the col- 
lege was laid, in 1387, there has been 
time not for one grandfather but for 
fifteen in a line. The prim and charm- 
ing buildings look every day as old as 
they are ; but if you were to go into 
the dormitories and see the rows of 
little iron bedsteads, each with a boy 
sleeping in it, you would find it hard 
9 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to realize that grandfathers of these 
boys have slept at Winchester for five 
hundred years back, and that all our 
grandfathers began by being young and 
small enough to sleep in such cots. 

The founder of the school was Will- 
iam of Wykeham, Bishop of the See of 
Winchester, who was not only a bishop 
and a statesman, but one of the great- 
est builders of the Middle Ages. He 
was the chief architect of the nave of 
the Cathedral of Winchester; and when 
the King wanted a new wing on his 
castle at Windsor he ordered Wyke- 
ham to build it. Wykeham was so 
proud of his work that he chiselled on 
it " Hoc fecit Wykeham " (" Wykeham 
made this "). At this the King was very 
angry, for he thought he had built the 
•castle himself ; and Wykeham would 
perhaps have lost his head if he had not 
kept his wits about him. He explained 
10 



WINCHESTER 

that it was his greatest glory to be the 
builder of his King's palace, and that 
the inscription should be read, "This 
was the making of Wykekam." The 
translation was clever enough, and, 
though the King was probably not 
deceived, "Wykeham kept his head on 
his shoulders. Perhaps the King would 
have been sorry to lose so valuable a 
man. At any rate, you can see the in- 
scription to-day from the North Ter- 
race ; and the incident throws no little 
light on the sincerity of the motto 
on the Winchester arms : " Manners 
Makyth Man." 



II. — THE COLLEGE AND THE HOUSES 

Wykeham's purpose in founding his 
school, or " college," as it has always 
been called at Winchester, was to pre- 
11 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

pare boys to enter a college he had just 
founded at Oxford. This Oxford col- 
lege had so progressive a constitution, 
and such a splendid chapel and build- 
ings, that it was called New College. 
What is more remarkable is that it has 
been called ]STew College these five 
hundred years, and to-day is still one 
of the most advanced colleges in all 
England. With one exception it is the 
most learned institution at Oxford ; and 
Americans will not soon forget how 
easily it rowed away from Yale last 
year at Henley. At Winchester and 
New College the scholars are very proud 
to call themselves Wykehamists ; and 
when a fellow has been through both, 
he is apt to tell you that he is a Wyke- 
hamist of the Wykehamists — which 
means more than you can ever un- 
derstand until you hear and see a man 
say it. 

12 



WINCHESTER 

The first result of the excellence of 
Wykekam's school was to make the 
boys too far advanced for the teaching 
they found at the university. In order 
to advance their education, Wykeham 
had to have a special body of tutors at 
New College. This innovation was the 
origin of the English custom of having 
a complete set of teachers at each of the 
score of colleges that make up a uni- 
versity. Thus Winchester is not only 
the father of all preparatory schools, 
but of the English university system of 
instruction by colleges. 

Wykeham intended that all his schol- 
ars should be chosen from the poorer 
people, and left funds to support them. 
Within the last generation, however, 
the masters have followed a very dif- 
ferent plan. In order to get the clever- 
est possible pupils, they examine all 
boys between twelve and fourteen who 
13 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

apply, and admit the best each year. 
About eight usually fail for one who 
gets in. The boys who succeed are, of 
course, those who have had the best 
training; and thus the fellows who get 
the benefit of Wykeham's money are 
usually sons of university graduates, 
and are often rich. Many people object 
strongly to this, and with good reason ; 
yet the method has one great virtue. 
Fellows get almost as much credit in 
school for being studious and able as 
for playing football or cricket, so that 
many of the richest fellows study hard- 
est. In our schools, and even in our 
universities, there is still a stupid prej- 
udice against being a first-rate scholar. 
And this prejudice will probably never 
wholly die out until a rich boy who 
stands well receives the title of scholar 
even if he does not take the scholarship 
mone\ T . 

14 



WINCHESTER 

Within the college at Winchester 
also there is keen competition. The 
five or six best students each year get 
scholarships at New College, which en- 
able them to go through the university 
with much less expense to themselves. 
This is called "getting off to ISTew," 
and is the greatest achievement of a 
Wykehamist. That such has been the 
case for at least two hundred years 
may be seen in the epitaph of a boy 
who died in 1676 from being hit by a 
stone : " In this school he stood first, 
and we hope he is not the last in 
heaven, where he went instead of Ox- 
ford." Where such is the case, there 
would seem to be little need of the 
quaint device, three hundred and fifty 
years old, if not older, which adorns 
the wall of the Old School. On the 
top line are a mitre and pastoral staff, 
with the words " aut disce" — which 
15 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

plainly indicate that if you study hard 
you will become a bishop. Beneath are 
a sword, a pen-case, and an ink-horn, 
with the words "aut discede" which 
indicate that even if you don't study 
you may still become a soldier or a law- 
yer. The third emblem is an exceeding- 
ly neat apple-twig rod, with the mot- 
to "Manet sors tertia (LEDI." The 
whole inscription Wykehamists trans- 
late : " Work, walk, or be whopped." 

Besides the "scholars" of the "college" 
Wykeham founded, another kind of pu- 
pils has grown up, called " commoners," 
who, instead of being supported by the 
"foundation," paj^ for lodging, board, 
and tuition — about seven hundred dol- 
lars a year. These, at first few and 
unimportant, have increased so greatly 
of late that they are everywhere re- 
garded as the characteristic kind of 
school-boy. The life of the commoners 
16 



WINCHESTER 

is much the same as that of the scholars ; 
but the division into those who are and 
those who are not supported by the col- 
lege is worth remembering, for a simi- 
lar distinction exists not only in all pub- 
lic schools, but in the colleges at Oxford 
and Cambridge. And at the universi- 
ties, also, the men who are not supported 
by the "foundation" have of late be- 
come more numerous and prominent 
in the public eye than the scholars for 
whom the colleges were founded. 

The history of the growth of the 
commoners in importance is a very good 
instance of the common - sense with 
which the public schools are governed. 
Even in Wykeham's original statutes 
of five hundred years ago there is ap- 
parently an allusion to boys studjang at 
Winchester who were not supported by 
the college. And a reference is extant, 
dating from 1547, which shows that it 
B 17 



SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

was then customary to take fees from 
such boys. These earlier commoners, 
however, were nothing like the modern 
ones, and were perhaps only studying 
at Winchester in the hope of being ad- 
mitted to the college. One fact with 
regard to them, however, is very im- 
portant to people who are interested in 
our American " preparatory " schools : 
there was very little restraint and disci- 
pline about their lives. A certain Lord 
Elcho, who was a commoner in the second 
quarter of the eighteenth century, says: 
"We did not learn Latin and Greek as 
well as we should have done had we 
been placed with a private tutor, but 
we were taught how to live as men of 
the world." This is pretty good for a 
fellow who had, as we are told, "just 
reached boyhood"; and we are not sur- 
prised to find that his life largely con- 
sisted in playing cards, haunting taverns. 
18 



WINCHESTER 

and the looseness of morals which such 
diversions are apt to produce. A similar 
and more vivid picture of the life of 
the Winchester commoner is given by 
Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine 
Pickle. When Peregrine was at the 
advanced age of fourteen he " adopts 
the pride and sentiments of a man, . . . 
becomes remarkably rich and fashion- 
able in his clothes, and gives entertain- 
ments to the ladies." It all sounds sur- 
prisingly like familiar incidents of fast 
life in certain of our American schools, 
where the idea was, until recently, to 
give the boys freedom in order to teach 
them manly independence. At present, 
it is pleasant to know, there is a distinct 
reaction against this spirit. 

The reaction in England came in the 

middle of the last century, and was 

largely due to the fact that the public 

schools were becoming more and more 

19 



SCHOOL BOY LIFE IK ENGLAND 

frequented by the sons of middle-class 
families. At Winchester, Dr. Burton 
very wisely responded to the demand 
for more adequate discipline by founding 
" Old Commoners," which served much 
the same purpose for the boys not " on 
the foundation " that Wykeham's build- 
ings served for the scholars. Dr. Bur- 
ton was not able, however, to transplant 
from the college the tradition of dis- 
cipline ; and as the number of boys in 
commoners increased it became harder 
and harder to keep them in proper con- 
trol. Finally, when the commoners had 
grown from 100, in 1859, to 300, eleven 
years later, it was obvious that if they 
were to be properly cared for they must 
be separated into smaller communities, 
and placed in the charge of a responsi- 
ble master. Beginning with 1860, the 
" tutor's house system " gradually super- 
seded " commoners." 



WINCHESTER 

To - day there are nine " houses," 
each containing about thirty-five boys. 
In these all the commoners find 
homes; and though their government 
is not so happy as that of the college, 
where the traditions handed down from 
Wykeham's time are still in force, the 
instruction and care of the boys are far 
more intimate and personal, and there- 
fore far better, than ever before. As 
the improvement in the management of 
our American schools is likely to come 
along the same lines as those followed 
in England, it is worth while to take a 
closer view of the " houses " ; but for 
this we shall have to wait till we get to 
Eton, where the system is, on the whole, 
best developed. 

In one respect English schools are 
very fortunate. The wives and daugh- 
ters of the masters live with them 
among the boys. To speak of Win- 
21 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Chester without telling about the wife of 
the Second Master, and how fond of her 
the big boys and little boys, good boys 
and bad boys are, would be to leave the 
part of Hamlet out of the play. Many 
are the gawky boys whom she has put 
at ease among people, and many the 
bad boys whom she has set right. One 
of the pleasantest things I saw at "Win- 
chester was a lot of Oxford men who 
had come back to her during vacation 
just to hear her call them Smith, Brown, 
and Kobinson. 

It does not happen at all the schools 
that the best scholars all live together, 
as at Winchester and Eton ; and many 
Wykehamists maintain that both schol- 
ars and commoners would gain by being 
mingled. If the brightest scholars were 
distributed among the houses, it would 
certainly do wonders towards spreading 
high standards and ideals of scholarship. 



WINCHESTER 

and thus greatly benefit the many. The 
Winchester College as it now stands, how- 
ever, is perhaps the brightest and the best 
collection of boys in England ; and is the 
best possible means of developing stu- 
dents of exceptional ability. The whole 
question is whether the school ought to 
look chiefly to the common run of boys 
or to the chosen few. In the long run, the 
college will doubtless be broken up, and 
the scholars distributed among the vari- 
ous houses. But doubtless also this re- 
form will be a long time in coming, and 
when it does come one of the noblest 
and most delightful institutions in Eng- 
land will have passed away. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



III. PREFECTORIAL DISCIPLINE 

The discipline at Winchester is not 
so strict as at many public schools, yet 
quite strict enough, according to Ameri- 
can standards. The boys — or men, as 
they are always called — are not allowed 
to enter the town, and have to get spe- 
cial " leave out " to go far into the coun- 
try. The school -day begins at seven 
o'clock, and bedtime comes at nine or 
ten. Constant attendance at pra} T ers 
is required, morning and night, and 
there are four services on Sunday. For 
breaches of discipline the boys are still 
flogged. One is tempted to say that 
such a system is very far from modern ; 
but no true Wykehamist would serious- 
ly think of changing it. Even the boys 
like it sincerely, in spite of some few 
breaches of discipline. Certainly the 

24 



WINCHESTER 

strictness has no more faults than the 
great freedom granted by certain of our 
large preparatory schools; and though 
we should perhaps not want to live just 
as English boys do, we may perhaps 
gain a few suggestions from the way 
they are governed. 

The main idea of the discipline of an 
English school is that as much of it as 
possible shall be carried on bj T the boys 
themselves. At Winchester it was or- 
dained from the beginning that eighteen 
of the older boys should, in Wykeham's 
own words, " oversee their fellows, and 
from time to time certify the masters of 
their behavior and progress in study." 
These eighteen are called prefects, and 
are chosen from the men who stand 
the highest in studies. To an Ameri- 
can boy, I am afraid, it wouldn't seem 
much fun to have to take care of his 
school-mates' behavior. He would prob- 
25 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ably look upon himself more or less as 
a spy. Yet even^thing I saw at Win- 
chester went to prove that to be a pre- 
fect was almost as great an honor as to 
be an athlete. Five of the prefects have 
special titles — such as Prefect of Hall, 
Prefect of Chapel, etc. These are gener- 
ally chosen from the five best scholars. 
The Prefect of Hall has charge not only 
of his special duties, but of the other 
prefects. If any disturbance takes place, 
he quells it. If the bo\ 7 s have any fa- 
vors to ask of their master, he is their 
spokesman. He is thus the head of the 
whole school, and a far more important 
person, I should say, than the captain 
of the cricket team. 

An incident occurred in 1838 which 
well illustrates the power of a prefect. 
A peddler insisted on bringing various 
contraband articles, among them liquor, 
to sell to the boys on their recreation- 
26 



WINCHESTER 

grounds. The prefects remonstrated 
time and again, with no effect. At last 
five of them seized him and threw him, 
basket and all, into the river. The ped- 
dler had the prefects arrested and tried 
for assault with intent to kill, and the 
magistrate fined them $50 each. This 
fine the college paid willingly, com- 
plimenting the prefects for their zeal 
and common-sense. The spirit which 
prompted both masters and pupils ex- 
ists to-day, not only at Winchester, but 
at all public schools. 

The duty of a prefect which an Ameri- 
can would least envy is that of inflicting 
bodily punishment — "tunding," as it is 
called in Winchester slang. This con- 
sists in beating the culprit across the 
back of his waistcoat with a ground-ash 
the size of one's finger. The art of 
tunding, an old Prefect of Hall in- 
formed me, was to catch the edge of the 
27 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

shoulder-blade with the rod, and strike 
in the same spot every time. In this 
way, he said, it was possible to cut the 
back of a waistcoat into strips. 

When the prefects take their inferiors 
in hand it is almost always for some 
clear case of wrong-doing. A few years 
ago, for instance, when the fad of col- 
lecting postmarks arrived at "Winches- 
ter, some of the boys clubbed together 
and advertised in leading daily papers 
for governesses, offering most attrac- 
tive terms. The answers to the adver- 
tisements, as the boys had rightly cal- 
culated, came mainly from curates' 
daughters in all sorts of obscure places. 
The first mail brought them in scores 
of rare postmarks. When the prefects 
heard of this they had the good sense 
to summon the culprits, inform them 
of the discourtesy and injustice of their 
conduct, and tund them soundly. I 



WINCHESTER 

have seldom heard of a sounder lesson 
in manners, and it is hard to see how 
a master, even a very wise one, could 
have acted with such good effect. 

This system leaves little for the mas- 
ters to do. Yet a boy is always able 
to carry his case to the higher court, 
though he does it at the risk of great 
unpopularity, for boys forgive almost 
any offence sooner than peaching. Some 
years ago two seniors, having a grudge 
against another boy, employed two 
juniors, at ninepence a head, to give 
him a beating. The prefects very nat- 
urally objected to this method of do- 
ing one's dirty work, and ordered all 
four to be tunded. One of the senior 
culprits lost courage when he found 
how hard it was going with his com- 
panion, and appealed to the master on 
the plea that the ground -ash was too 
large. The master declared that the 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ground-ashes were "proper, good ground- 
ashes," and, as it was his duty to treat 
all cases referred to him, proceeded to 
birch him soundly. In the early part 
of the century, birching by the master 
was of more than daily occurrence. An 
old Wykehamist states that on the day 
of his arrival at school there were 198 
boys in residence, and 279 names re- 
ported for punishment ! Nowadays, 
however, only a score or so of cases 
occur each year, and many boys go 
through the school without being either 
birched or tunded. 

The primary result of this perfec- 
torial system, which exists in various 
forms in all the great public schools, is 
that order is maintained without creating 
ill-feeling between masters and pupils. 
And in consequence, as nearly as I could 
judge, the pupils were on far more 
friendly and intimate terms with their 



WINCHESTER 

masters than is often the case in our 
schools. Thus the more difficult prob- 
lems of the education of a boy's man- 
ners and morals are very much more 
easily solved. And I found another 
advantage in the prefectorial system 
by no means less in importance. Not 
only do the small boys find out what 
it is to obey with simplicity and dig- 
nity, but each year eighteen big boys 
at Winchester learn to fill posts re- 
quiring unusual common-sense, tact, and 
courage. Thus though the life of an 
English school-boy is in one way less 
independent than the life of boys in our 
American schools, the English boys 
have a privilege which is the very es- 
sence of freedom — they are allowed to 
govern themselves. I know no institu- 
tion which indicates more clearly than 
this idea of Wykeham's the English 
genius for governing, which has made 

31 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Great Britain and her colonies the best 
administered countries in the world. 



IV. — CUSTOMS AND " NOTIONS 7 

I doubt if any one can quite catch the 
spirit of the antique and curious customs 
that make up Winchester life who has 
not known the college buildings and 
lived in them. They stand to-day al- 
most precisely as they were built five 
hundred years ago — that is, a hundred 
years before Columbus discovered Amer- 
ica — with this difference, that the flint 
walls are stained and subdued by time. 
As the afternoon sunlight softens, and 
the rich, clear tones of evening descend, 
the main court of the college is filled 
with mellow lights and shadows ; and 
pervaded as the spot is w T ith the breath 
of ancient life, one easily imagines that 



WINCHESTER 

the splendid spirit of mediaeval art is 
hovering along the walls. One of the 
boys I met spoke of something like this, 
and spoke with such simplicity and feel- 
ing that I could not help wishing that 
our own school-boys had more beautiful 
things to live with day by day. Un- 
consciously the simplicity and strength 
of it all sink into the heart and abide 
there. 

One evening the Prefect of Hall in- 
vited me to a "strawberry mess" he 
was giving in a corner of the court. 
He had won a "pot," he said, and it was 
the custom to celebrate by giving a 
feast. A " pot," I found, might be any 
prize, from an athletic cup to a scholar- 
ship; but when I asked the particular 
occasion he shied the question. Tables 
were brought out-of-doors and heaped 
with strawberries and ice-cream. The 
whole was lighted by candles in brass 

c 33 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

stands ; and the boys gathered about in 
their sombre black gowns, talking and 
laughing as they ate. Late in the even- 
ing, when I went back to the Second 
Master's house, which looked out from 
the opposite corner of the court, I was 
told that our little party, with our black 
gowns and yellow candles, had made a 
picture that was fairly romantic. We 
were all so small, they said, and the 
shadows the flickering candles cast on 
the huge buttresses and on the walls 
were so uncanny, that we looked like a 
band of dwarfs and gnomes. It made 
me feel like the Irishwoman with a 
"new bonnet, who said she could never 
be perfectly happy until she stood on 
the 1 street-corner and saw herself go by ; 
but as the dwarfs and gnomes were all 
by this time fast asleep in bed, there 
was no help for it. 

Around the court or in its vicinity 
34 




THE CHAPEL CORNER OF CHAMBER COURT 



WINCHESTER 

are ranged the domestic buildings of the 
college— the slaughter-house, the bake- 
house, the kitchen, and the brew-house. 
The Second Master, as I have said, oc- 
cupies one corner, and one of the dons 
lives in the tower. Besides these are the 
magnificent dining-hall and the chapel. 
For the rest, the court is divided into 
seven chambers, or " shops," as the boys 
call them, from which it takes its name of 
Chamber Court. Each " shop " consists 
of a sleeping-room and a study -room, 
and in each a community of, say, a doz- 
en boys lives, over whom three prefects 
preside. The sleeping-rooms are locked 
up, except at night. In the study-room 
each boy has a desk, which he calls his 
" horse-box." The prefects have tables 
placed in commanding positions. These 
are called " washing-stools." 

A few relics of dead customs are cher- 
ished by the college. At one side of 
35 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Chamber Court you will find the re- 
mains of the ancient conduit. Here, on 
the stone pavement and in the open air, 
five centuries of boys have taken their 
baths, summer and winter. Bathingcould 
not always, however, be as regular as in 
these days, when travelling Englishmen 
pack their clothes in a leather-covered 
bath-tub instead of a trunk. Some 
decades ago bath-rooms were fitted up 
within -doors, in rooms formerly occu- 
pied by learned Fellows of the college, 
so that now the boys bathe daily with- 
out exposure to cold. The old lava- 
tory of the college was called " Moab," 
while the shoe-blacking place was called 
" Edom." I wonder how many Ameri- 
can school-boys are as familiar as those 
old English boys must have been with 
the Psalm that says, " Moab is my wash- 
pot ; over Edom will I cast out my 
shoe." 



WINCHESTER 

The ancient brew-house in outer court 
is still used — largely, I suppose, for the 
sake of tradition. When I took luncheon 
in Hall with the prefects, they rather 
sniffed at the beer made in it. Under 
King William, however, the boys thought 
differently, and used to sing a jolly 
drinking-song, which was popular all 
over England : 

"Now let us all, both great and small, 

With voice both loud and clear, 
Right merrily sing, Live Billy our King ! 

For 'bating the tax on beer. 

For I likes my drop of good beer ; 

For I likes my drop of good beer. 
So whene'er I goes out I carries about 

My little pint bottle of beer." 

To my taste the beer was very good, 
and not too strong. Perhaps it is a 
sign of the good sense of Wykehamists 
that they preferred water or milk. 
One might also class fagging, with 
37 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

which all readers of Tom Brown are 
familiar, with the dead and dying cus- 
toms. It is limited to a few simple 
offices. A senior still sends small boys 
on errands, and sometimes makes him 
cook and wash bottles at private feasts 
in chambers. Every evening, too, when 
the post comes in, the porter of the col- 
lege brings it to Chamber Court, and 
at a signal the junior of each chamber 
rushes out to get what belongs to his 
fellows. Yet, unless I am very much 
mistaken, life at Winchester, in spite of 
occasional fagging, is much pleasanter 
and better regulated than in most of 
our schools. 

In olden times fag-masters were often 
brutal enough. In order to> accustom 
the fags to handling hot dishes, the sen- 
iors would sometimes score their hands 
with glowing fagots. This provided 
them with " tin gloves." A more amus- 




A PREFECT AT HIS " WASHING-STOOL " 



WINCHESTER 

ing bit of barbarity was the " toe fittie," 
pronounced to-fi-ty. This consisted in 
tying a string about a boy's great toe 
while he lay asleep, and then violently 
pulling it until the boy was drawn 
out of his bed to his tormentor's side. 
Sometimes two or three would be 
brought from different parts of a cham- 
ber to the same point. In America I 
have often known a boy to tie a string- 
about his own toe, and hang it out of 
the window so that a friend might wake 
him up to go out fishing; but that is a 
different thing. 

Such quaint and ancient customs are 
common at all English schools, but no- 
where are there so many as at Winches- 
ter. In fact the boys speak a patois of 
their own, which an outsider hasn't the 
least chance of understanding. For in- 
stance, I heard one Wykehamist say : 
"Is Smith a thick, or only a thoking 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

jig?" The sentence loses its flavor in 
translation, but it may best, perhaps, 
be rendered: "Is Smith a blockhead 
[thick], or is he a clever boy [jig] who 
likes to loaf [thoke]?" 

Much of this Wykehamical jargon 
stands for notions that are peculiar to 
Winchester. For pure ingenuity the so- 
called "scheme" bears the palm. It 
was always the duty of a certain luckless 
junior to wake the prefect at an early 
hour every morning, and if he overslept 
he was of course tunded. Noticing that 
the night candle always burned to a cer- 
tain point at this hour, some nameless 
fag invented the plan of hanging a hat- 
box over his head by a string, and, con- 
necting the string with this point of the 
candle by a rude fuse, he thus made 
sure that the hat-box would fall on his 
head at the required hour. Under this 
sword of Damocles he could, of course, 
40 



WINCHESTER 

sleep without fear of flogging — in peace 
and quiet. 

All such things — " tin gloves," " toe 
fitties," and "schemes" — are called no- 
tions. Every house owns a book in 
which notions, ancient and modern, are 
recorded. And a boy's first duty, upon 
coming to the school, is to pass an ex- 
amination before his superiors on the 
mysterious contents of the book. Of 
late years this examination on the no- 
tion-book is becoming less a matter of 
course — a breach of custom which all old 
Wykehamists regret. By-and-by, I am 
afraid, the merest outsider will be able 
to understand something of what the 
boys are talking about. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



V. THE WYKEHAMIST 

When I tried to satisfy myself as to 
what particular stamp of man Winches- 
ter produces, I ran into a peculiar dif- 
ficulty. The ideal towards which the 
school is consciously working is well 
expressed by one of the masters. " I 
consider that those boj^s who issue from 
the top of the school — i.e., those upon 
whom the highest influences of the 
school have been brought to bear — are 
boys who . . . carry into life a stamp, 
not of a very showy kind, but distin- 
guished by self-reliance, modesty, prac- 
tical good- sense, and strong religious 
feeling." Another student of Winches- 
ter life describes the Wj'kehamist as 
possessing simplicity, unity, and solidi- 
ty. These judgments, it is interesting 
to note, are wholly concerned with 
42 



WINCHESTER 

questions of character. There is no 
word about learning or intellectual abil- 
ity. And the qualities mentioned are 
characteristic not merely of all public 
schools, but of all England. It would 
have been more concise to say that the 
school produces good Englishmen. Yet 
as far as I could see, Winchester differs 
from other public schools as much as 
Groton differs from Exeter or St. Paul's. 
The boys are not, as a rule, of such aristo- 
cratic birth as Etonians, or so uniformly 
from the middle classes as the Rugbe- 
ians. In the college, at least, birth is of 
little or no importance compared with 
intellectual ability. As far as I was 
able to find out, the Wykehamist is not 
so remarkable for simplicity, unity, and 
solidity as for an unusual degree of 
training and culture. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



VI. FOOTBALL 

To speak at length of every sport at 
each of the great public schools would 
take a book by itself. I shall have to 
speak of each sport once and for all : 
and in order to do this it will be neces- 
sary to speak of it as practised in all 
the schools. 

Football would hardly be played to- 
day if it were not for the public schools. 
The reason is that about three centuries 
ago the Puritans succeeded in stamping 
out athletic sports almost everywhere 
else. Here is what Philip Stubbes, a 
terribly blue old Puritan, said of foot- 
ball in 1583: "It may rather be called 
a freendly kinde of fight, then a play or 
recreation; A bloody and murthering 
practice, then a felowly sporte or pas- 
time. For dooth not every one lye in 
44 



WINCHESTER 

waight for his Adversarie, seeking to 
overthrow him & to picke him [that 
is, pitch him] on his nose, though it be 
upon hard stones? . . . And he that can 
serve most in this fashion, he is counted 
the only felow, and who but he % . . . 
And hereof groweth envie, malice, ran- 
cour, . . . quarrel picking, murther, and 
great effusion of blood, as experience 
dayly teacheth." In America there are 
newspaper editors to-day who think as 
badly of the game, though in most cases 
they spell better. 

Though the Puritans almost succeeded 
in stamping out the game, there were 
even then a few people who were 
manly enough to see its virtues. In 
1602, one Carew said: "The play is 
verilie both rude and rough, yet such as 
is not destitute of policies in some sort 
resembling the feats of war. . . . It 
makes their bodies strong, hard, and 

45 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

nimble, and puts a courage into their 
hearts to meet an enemy in the face. . . . 
All is good play, and never an attorney 
or coroner troubled for the matter. 1 ' 
The masters of the public schools must 
have been of the same excellent opinion, 
for in almost every school the game 
kept on being played. As this was long 
before inter-school sports, however, each 
school in time came to play the game in 
a way quite different from all the rest. 
The original game of football, against 
which Stubbes rebels, must have been a 
very pell-mell affair. As many fellows 
as wanted to play divided into two sides; 
the field could be anything from three 
miles or more of a country road to a 
ten-acre lot, the goals anything from an 
open window in one town to a tree 
trunk in a neighboring village. You 
could kick, punch, or carry the ball, 
tackle a man as high or as low as vou 



WINCHESTER 

pleased, and there was no " off-side." 
All you had to do was to get the ball to 
the goal. 

At Winchester a game of this kind 
was played as early as 1550 on the top 
of St. Catherine's Hill, called " Hills," 
where the boys used to go for a little 
recreation. In the course of time it was 
transferred to " Meads," a play-ground 
near the school. As there was not 
enough room in " Meads " for the old 
game, many rules had to be formed. 
The result was the present Winchester 
game, which is the most peculiar of all 
the games played at the public schools. 
The field is eighty yards long; but in 
order to make room for four games in 
" Meads," it is only twenty-five yards 
wide. At first, to prevent the ball from 
going out of bounds a line of fags had 
to stand shivering beside the field. The 
goal was a fag who stood straddle at 

47 



SCHOOL-BOY LTFE IN ENGLAND 

the end of the field ; and the highest 
single score was made by kicking the 
ball between goal's legs. In 1850 can- 
vas was put up at the sides of the fields 
instead of fags. Tradition says, how- 
ever, that there were holes cut through 
the canvas at equal intervals in order 
that the fags might watch the ball and 
chase it when it went over the canvas. 
When they were slow in getting the 
ball back they had to stick their heads 
through the holes and be punished for 
it. Nowadays a coarse net has replaced 
the canvas ; but you will still see the 
fags hanging round outside, waiting for 
the ball to be kicked out of bounds. 

The rules of the game are too com- 
plicated to give more than a brief 
sketch. The only occasion on which 
you may run with the ball as you run 
in the Rugby game is when, to use the 
American term, an opponent tries to 
48 



WINCHESTER 

tackle you on a free catch ; and even 
then, as soon as he stops chasing you, 
you have to punt. You may not drib- 
ble the ball — that is, nurse it along the 
ground, "passing" it from one to an- 
other of the same side — as is done in 
the English Association game ; but 
you may kick it. Still, you may not 
kick it higher than five feet unless it is 
bounding ; then you may lift it as high 
as you choose. The "off-side" rule is 
about as strict as possible. The game 
begins with a "hot," or scrimmage. 
Both sides stand in the centre of the 
field, at a certain distance from the ball. 
At the signal they rush forward in a 
compact bod} 7 and butt each other un- 
til the stronger side kicks the ball free 
of the " hot." 

There are two games, "sixes" and 
"fifteens." The following illustration 
shows a hot in the sixes game. This 
d 49 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE L\ T ENGLAND 

kind of hot does not last long, and after 
the ball is kicked out the play is very 
fast and skilful, requiring great dash and 
accuracy in kicking. In the fifteens 
game the hots last longer, so that 
weight is very important. The first 
diagram shows the field at the opening 
of a hot, and explains some of the queer 
terms used. 





*" 


„ 


XX 


: 


0' 
O' 

ooo 
• ooo 


o" 




0" 


ix 






xx 


\ 


ooo 
o' 




o 





A A and A' A', canvas ; B B and B' B', ropes ; 
B B' and B B', goal-lines, or ' ' worms " ; • , the ball ; 
X and O, opposing players; X' and O', "hot- 
watcliers"— i. e., " ups," who keep outside the hot 
and close play ; X" and O", "kicks." 



The second diagram represents the 
position when, in the course of the 



50 



WINCHESTER 

game, X are making a successful rush, 
having three men up to the ball. The 
rest of the side X are getting to the 
ball as fast as they can. The side 
are falling back on their second "be- 
hind," or " back." 



B 
B' 








X " X' 

X X 

X" 


S x.°' X 
o o' 


o'i " 

d'! fl 









All sorts of matches are played. Each 
house holds games to develop new play- 
ers, and towards the end of the year a 
series of matches takes place among the 
three grand divisions of the school — the 
collegers, who number seventy ; the pu- 
pils of the old masters' houses, who 
number two hundred; and the com- 
moners, who number one hundred and 
51 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IX ENGLAND 

sixty. Between these divisions there 
are three sets of games, for the older, 
middle, and younger boys. These are 
called " Canvas," " Middle Game," and 
" Junior Game." The fifteens matches 
take place in the first week of Novem- 
ber, and the sixes in the first week of 
December. The most exciting match 
of the year is between a team chosen 
from the entire school and a team of 
" Old Wykes " — made up of Wykeham- 
ists at the universities. 

The other school games of football are 
very interesting, but I must hurry over 
them. Eton has two games. The fa- 
mous wall game is supposed to be de- 
rived from "passage football," which Eto- 
nians play in the houses on rainy winter 
days, using the doors at the ends of the 
passage as goals. At any rate, the field 
beside the wall is very much the shape 
of a hall, being only six yards wide to 



WINCHESTER 

one hundred and twenty yards long, and 
one of the goals is a door. As this door 
stands outside of the six-yard boundary- 
line, the boys who invented the game 
had to go quite out of their way to get 
it. This shows what great conservatives 
school-boys are. If they had been able, 
I suppose they would have built a second 
wall with door-jambs all along it. The 
bo} T s who play the wall game incase 
themselves in armor more formidable 
than that which an American player 
wears, and they have ear-guards and 
nose-guards and chin-guards to keep the 
wall from scraping off the corners of 
their faces. The ball is small, and even 
at that it is so roughly scrambled for 
that it has to be double covered, for fear 
of bursting. To play the game requires 
some little knack, but for the most part 
it is mere grunting and shoving. It is 
not really liked even by the players, 
53 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

and would probably die out except that 
there has always been a match on St. 
Andrew's Day between collegers and the 
oppidans — that is, the boys who live in 
the houses. In this match the seventy 
collegers usually have as good a team as 
the thousand oppidans. .The reason is 
that they play the game from the begin- 
ning of their life at school, whereas the 
oppidans generally take it up late. 

The other Eton game, which was 
made possible when playing-fields were 
laid out across the river from the wall 
field, is as much fun to play as the Win- 
chester game. As the field is of normal 
size and shape, however, the play is not 
so odd. It begins with a " bully," or 
scrimmage, not unlike that in a Eugby 
game ; but when this breaks up the 
game is more nearly like Association. 
The main feature is dribbling. 

The Harrow game is even more like 
54 




A "HOUSE TEAM AT ETON READY FOR THE FIELD 



WINCHESTER 

Association ; and at Westminster and 
Charterhouse a game is played which 
is virtually the father of Association. 
The chief features of these games are 
dribbling and passing along the ground 
from foot to foot. 

In all these games two marked feat- 
ures of the ancient game are absent — 
running with the ball under the arm 
and tackling. Both of these features 
require a field of considerable size, and 
clothing that will not be spoiled by 
grinding it in the mud. This fact has 
convinced an old Oxford football-player 
and track athlete, Mr. Montague Shear- 
man, who has written the Badminton 
volume on his favorite sports, that run- 
ning and tackling were left out of most 
of the school games because the fields 
were too narrow and clothes were too 
dear. At Rugby, however, the field 
was so large that running and tackling 
55 



SCHOOL BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

were never abolished, though, of course, 
certain limitations had to be introduced. 
Thus Rugby alone has preserved all the 
essential features of the ancient game 
which won brave old Carew's admira- 
tion — namely, scrimmages, running with 
the ball, tackling, passing from hand to 
hand, dribbling, passing from foot to 
foot, kicking, and punting. An early 
form of this game, played by innumer- 
able boys, is familiar to all readers of 
Tom Brown. Its more modern forms — 
played by twenties, and later by fif- 
teens — is the father of our American 
Rugby. We have lost, however, several 
features of old English Rugby— ^name- 
ly, scrimmaging, dribbling, and passing 
along the ground. We have almost lost 
passing from hand to hand. Yet our 
game has much more "of policies re- 
sembling in some sort the feats of war" 
— namely, team - play and stratagems ; 
56 



WINCHESTER 

and it certainly "puts a courage into 
our hearts to meet an enemy in the 
face." By-and-by, let us hope, all will 
be "good play, and never an attorney 
. . . troubled for the matter," as foot- 
ball always has been in the English 
schools. 

The difference in spirit between Eng- 
lish and American football is plain to 
see in the costumes. Everybody knows 
how grimy and sweaty our football suits 
get to be; and everybody who has 
known football-players knows that they 
rather like to have them so. They 
think it more like veteran players to be 
dirty and smell bad. On warm autumn 
days the men are so very veteran that 
one often finds it much pleasanter to 
watch the practice from the windward 
side of the field. In England they think 
fresh air essential to physical health, 
and they wash football clothes about as 
57 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

often as any other. In fact, they do 
much more than this — they try to make 
football pleasant to the eye. At Har- 
row, for instance, the fields are in the 
greenest of meadows, under the famous 
old Hill, and are surrounded by hedges 
and elin-trees. Here, after luncheon on 
any day in early autumn, you will see 
the teams of a dozen or more houses, 
each in its peculiar house color. There 
are scarlet shirts, purple shirts, yellow 
shirts, crimson shirts, and many pretty 
combinations of colors besides. Here 
and there you will see a man in plain 
dark blue — that is a man who has " got 
his school colors." It is surprising to 
find that plain Englishmen, whom we 
Americans always think so very stolid 
and prosaic, make every-day things so 
beautiful. 

The many different school games are 
as popular now as ever, and no doubt 
58 



WINCHESTER 

will always flourish, 'the new boys, to 
be sure, sometimes confess that they like 
Rugby and Association better. At Har- 
row I heard two youngsters scarcely 
out of pinafores whisper something of 
this sort in a " tuck-shop," over a lemon- 
ice ; but I trembled at their daring, for 
in an old boy's eyes this would be 
rank treason to Tradition, and in the 
public schools tradition is spelled with 
a capital T. At the universities the best 
players go in for Rugby or Association, 
because they very naturally want to 
" get their blue " for playing against the 
rival university ; but they never cease 
to be fond of the games of their school- 
days. From time to time old "Wyke- 
hamists play old "Wykehamists, and old 
Etonians play old Etonians. You may 
see them almost any winter afternoon 
you make the rounds of the university 
parks and the college playing-fields. If 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

you try to understand all the games you 
see, you will soon get to hate them ; and 
if you ask your friends who play them 
to explain them, they will soon hate you 
for a blockhead. Yet crazy as some of 
the games seem, they are worthy and 
venerable games, for during that dark 
period of Puritanism, when fun and 
frolic were thought works of the devil, 
they kept alive the love of manly sport 
in the hearts of generations of school- 
boys. 



ETON 



ETON 

I. WINCHESTER AND ETON 

Fifty -three years after "William of 
Wykeham founded Winchester, King- 
Henry the Sixth founded a school at 
Eton, a little town across the Thames 
from his castle at Windsor. The rules he 
drew up for governing his " college" he 
copied from Wykeham's statutes, some 
of them word for word ; and in order 
to give it the best possible start, he 
took one-half the college at Winchester 
— the head-master (Waynflete), five Fel- 
lows, and thirty-five scholars — and set- 
tled them at Eton. And just as the 
best scholars at Winchester received 
63 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

scholarships at New College, Oxford, 
those at Eton received scholarships at 
King's College, Cambridge. For a long 
time Eton was a mere daughter of 
Winchester; but as the years went by 
it took a different character. For sev- 
eral centuries past it has educated more 
sons of the aristocracy and nobility than 
any of the other schools. And as the 
aristocracy has always taken a leading 
part in the government of the Empire, 
even in these days of democracy, Eton 
has naturally become famous for the 
number of statesmen it has graduated. 
Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Lord 
Rosebery, Mr. A. Balfour, the late Lord 
Randolph Churchill, Lord Kimberley, 
Mr. G. Curzon, and many others, are 
old Etonians. The popularity of the 
school with the upper classes sprang 
partly, no doubt, from the fact that it 
lies in the very shadow of the royal 



ETON 

castle of Windsor; and it has been 
stimulated from time to time by the fact 
that the school has received marked 
testimony of royal favor. George the 
Third and William the Fourth took a 
lively personal interest in its welfare ; 
and in late years members of the royal 
family, the sons of the Duke of Con- 
naught and the little Duke of Albany, 
grandchildren of Queen Yictoria, have 
come to Eton to prepare for the uni- 
versity. To-day the school numbers 
over a thousand — twice as many as 
Winchester — and its graduates include 
far more men of birth or genius than 
those of any other public school. Of 
late years it has become the tradition 
for Etonians to go to Oxford rather 
than to Cambridge ; and especially to 
Christ Church, which has in conse- 
quence received much the same reputa- 
tion among English colleges as Eton 

e 65 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

has among the schools. Thus, just as 
Wykeham's excellent instruction at 
Winchester in the end raised the stand- 
ard of scholarship at Oxford, so Eton 
has made Oxford the university of the 
English aristocracy. 



II.— THE COLLEGE 

Eton, like Winchester, has seventy 
scholars, whose formal title is " King's 
Scholars," or " Kingsmen," though they 
are more familiarly called " Collegers." 
In the slang of the school they are 
" tugs," a word which probably refers to 
the togas — that is, gowns — which, as at 
Winchester, were the badge of those sup- 
ported by the foundation. Their posi- 
tion in the eyes of the rest of the school, 
however, is so different from that of their 
brothers at Winchester that they are 
66 



ETON 

commonly called "beastly tugs"; and 
even when the " beastly " is unspoken, 
it is implied in the " tug." 

The reasons for this prejudice carry 
one back to the earliest times. The 
statutes of Henry the Sixth provide 
that collegers shall be poor and needy 
boys : it is expressly stipulated that 
any one having an annual income of 
more than five marks shall be ineligi- 
ble. In a community where the tradi- 
tions have always been largely aristo- 
cratic, this must inevitably give rise to 
class prejudice. Another and perhaps 
more powerful cause of disrepute lies in 
the wretched way in which, for genera- 
tion upon generation, the collegers were 
housed and fed. Until well into the 
present century, the sixteen senior col- 
legers had no water except what they 
made the lower boys fetch in for them 
overnight from the pump in the yard. 
67 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The lower boys had no chance of wash- 
ing at all in college, for they were not 
allowed wash-stands and basins. A 
deputation which in 1838 asked that a 
supply of water might be laid in col- 
lege was dismissed with the remark 
that they would be wanting gas and 
Turkey -carpets next. Compared with 
such a state of affairs, the conduit in 
Chamber Court at Winchester was by 
way of being a luxury. The bedroom 
and bedding were as squalid as the 
boys who slept in them ; and the whole 
atmosphere of the place must have 
breathed of mediaeval filth. In addi- 
tion to this, the system of fagging in 
vogue required the lower boys to per- 
form services which, most Englishmen 
think unfit for any but servants, and 
which in consequence destroyed the self- 
respect of the young collegers. Any 
neglect of duty was met with brutal 
68 



ETON 

punishment. An old Etonian, who went 
into the college in 1824, records that 
he was often beaten with the back of 
a brush and struck on both sides of 
the face because he failed to close tight 
the shutter near his fagmaster's bed, or 
because in making his bed he had left 
the seam of the lower sheet uppermost. 
And when he w r as kept up late at 
night with fagging, he had to look for- 
ward to the probability of a flogging 
for not knowing his lessons. The food 
served in the college hall was as unlit 
as the life the collegers led, and the 
morals of the community were so low 
that it is impossible to speak of them. 
It is no wonder that, as is recorded, the 
name of being a colleger became a 
proverb and a reproach, and that none 
but the poorest or the most neglectful 
parents allowed their sons to enter the 
college. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

All this was made possible by the 
fact that for generations the men whose 
duty it was to care for the boys and pro- 
tect them neglected their duty, and ap- 
propriated the funds of the college to 
their own uses. While the wretched 
collegers were suffering in morals, mind, 
and body, the head -master lived in a 
luxurious private house and enjoyed an 
income equal to that of many a bishop, 
derived in part from the ill-used col- 
legers. 

This state of affairs was not peculiar 
to Eton. To a greater or less extent 
it was characteristic of all the great 
schools. In 1860 a public outcry was 
raised, and in the following year a 
Royal Commission was appointed to 
look into the administration of the nine 
leading institutions. In 1868 an act 
was passed by Parliament authorizing 
certain commissioners to draw up new 
70 



ETON 

constitutions for the leading public 
schools; and in 1872 the statutes which 
Henry the Sixth had framed for Eton 
were repealed, and new statutes passed. 
The whole movement which caused this 
upheaval of ancient institutions is very 
interesting, and is very characteristic 
of the humane spirit of the century 
in which we live. When we come to 
Rugby we shall find that Dr. Thomas 
Arnold, who is familiar as " The Doc- 
tor " to all readers of Tom Brown, was 
the pioneer in the movement ; and in 
speaking of him I shall have more to 
say about it. For the present we are 
concerned with its effect on the college 
at Eton. 

After the middle of the century the 
lodgings had little by little improved, 
the discipline had become better, and 
the food more palatable. The tugs are 
no longer obliged to wear the thick, 
71 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

black gowns of the middle ages, which 
had become a badge of inferiority. Un- 
der the statutes of 1872 poverty ceased 
to be one of the qualifications for ad- 
mission. This did more than most Amer- 
ican boys can imagine to break down 
the prejudice against the tugs. Up to 
this time, moreover, the boys had been 
admitted practically by nomination, for 
the entrance examinations were a mere 
matter of form. Under the new stat- 
utes the prize of a scholarship in the 
college is to be had, as is the case at 
Winchester, only by passing a severe 
competitive examination. Thus the col- 
legers have not only come to be the sons 
of the well-to-do, but are chosen, on the 
whole, from the cleverest of them. Of 
late years not a few of the collegers have 
been first-rate athletes and good fellows 
all round. All these facts have worked 
wonders in establishing the college in 



ETON 

the opinion of the rest of the school. 
One still hears of " beastly tugs," to he 
sure; and the aristocratic prejudices 
against being supported by the college 
will be many years more in dying. Yet 
one finds it mostly among the younger 
boys ; and even they probably do not feel 
it as much as the} 7 pretend. There is no 
good reason why, in the course of time, 
the Eton College should not become as 
strong and dignified a body as the col- 
lege at Winchester. Certainly for the 
credit of the English aristocracy the first 
care of the masters should be to make 
it so. 



III. — THE OPPIDANS 

Just as the statutes of Winchester 
provided for the education of common- 
ers, so those of Eton provided that boys 
who are not supported by the foundation 
73 



SCHOOL BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

might receive free instruction. These 
were at first called commsnsales, from the 
fact that they ate in the same hall as 
the collegers. They were of two classes, 
as was the case at Winchester — the sons 
of noblemen and gentlemen, and those 
of lower birth. After Henry the Eighth 
dissolved the monasteries, the boys who, 
in the earlier day, would have gone to 
school to the monks went to Eton as 
commensals, and so swelled the muster 
that little by little they outgrew the col- 
lege. Those of the lower class went to 
lodge in the town; and in 1557, not 
long after the dissolution of the mon- 
asteries, we find them called opydans, 
and oppidans they remain to this day. 
During the civil wars of the seven- 
teenth century the commensals of the 
higher class put by their books and 
took up the sword to fight for King 
Charles. This was the last of the noble 
74 



ETON 

commensals, for since then the oppidans 
have included all classes alike. 

At about this time the oppidans began 
to board as well as to lodge in the town. 
In 1765 there were thirteen boarding- 
houses. Three of these were kept by 
masters of obscure position, who taught 
the less recognized branches. The rest 
were kept by women, or " dames," who 
doubtless had considerable responsibility 
for their boys, if not authority over them. 
They seem to have held about the same 
position as the women with whom boys 
board at Exeter and Andover. And, as 
in America, the discipline of boys so 
governed seems to have been lax at 
times. A reform came about 1870, 
when, the study of mathematics, sci- 
ence, and modern languages having be- 
come thoroughly recognized, teachers 
in these subjects were placed on an 
equal footing with the long-established 
75 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

masters of Latin and Greek ; and, being 
given authority out of school as well as 
in school, took charge, little by little, 
of the boarding - houses. The house- 
masters have thus become responsible 
for the manners and morals of the op- 
pidans, and most of them in their ca- 
pacity of tutor have charge of the edu- 
cation of the boys in their houses. To 
this day, however — such is the force of 
tradition — all masters who are not also 
tutors are called " dames." 

With the wholesome educational re- 
forms of the nineteenth century the pop- 
ularity of all the leading public schools 
rapidly strengthened ; and though Eton 
was far from pre-eminent so far as teach- 
ing went, its position and reputation 
appear to have made it popular far 
above the other schools. To-day the 
oppidans number over a thousand, and 
Eton is almost double the size of any 



ETON 

of the other leading schools. Such a 
growth, which, in an American school, 
would be fatal to the traditions of a 
place, if not to its discipline, has had 
little or no effect at Eton. The division 
of the oppidans into houses gives each 
boy a permanent home from the day he 
arrives, where he at once becomes a 
part of Eton life; and the supervision 
of the master is like that of a parent. 
The houses have much of the same re- 
lationship to the school that the English 
colleges have to the university. Both 
have been the result of long centuries 
of growth in England, and as our Amer- 
ican schools and colleges expand we 
shall do well to study them. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



IV. THE MODERN "HOUSES 

A glance at the houses, with their 
broad, ivy -covered fronts and their 
window - boxes blazing with flowers, 
gives a very good idea of how pleasant- 
ly the modern oppidans live. And the 
houses cluster so affectionately about 
the beautiful and ancient college build- 
ings that it is hard to remember that 
the boys who live in them ever had 
anything but the most fraternal feel- 
ing for the collegers. And they are as 
pleasant within as without. Instead of 
large, common sleeping-rooms or cham- 
bers, such as the scholars have at Win- 
chester, the boys have each a room of his 
own. These are seldom more than twelve 
feet square, and besides a folding-bed, 
bath-tub, and wash-stand, they contain 
not only a fireplace and a tea-table, 
78 



" : , HI 




U.J . 



ETON 

but also a study table and chair, and 
sometimes a bookcase and an ottoman. 
You wouldn't think there was much 
space left for a boy to live in, to say 
nothing of making a noise, but I have 
heard astonishing stories of the rackets 
that go on. One old Etonian told me 
that with some other fellows he gath- 
ered all the bath-tubs in a passage, and 
shoved them through the transom into 
some poor fellow's room. This filled 
the room so full that before the boy 
who owned it could go to bed he had to 
get the " boys' maid " to drag out each 
separate bath-tub, amid vast sound and 
confusion. On rainy days in winter the 
boys play football up and down the pas- 
sages, using the doors at the ends for 
goals. This also makes enough noise. 
But these are not the only diversions. 
In some of the rooms I saw collections 
of books far larger and more wisely 
79 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

selected than are usual on the shelves 
even of American university men. 

A boy enters his " house " at about 
twelve years old. From this time on 
he is carefully watched by the house- 
master, with a view to checking his 
bad traits and developing his good 
ones. Most of the masters make it a 
point to find out all they can about a 
boy from his parents, and then carry 
on his training as it was begun ; or if 
they think his training unwise, to cor- 
rect it. The fact that most of the 
troublesome details of discipline are in 
the hands of the elder boys makes a 
master's relations with his pupils unus- 
ually frank and affectionate. And as 
the masters are always well educated, 
usually sensible, and often famous ath- 
letes, they have a strong and very ad- 
mirable influence. Much of all this, of 
course, the boy never suspects. He 



ETON 

simply grows to respect and like his 
master without quite knowing why. 

Perhaps the most important friend- 
ship a boy makes in his house is with his 
fag -master. His chief duties as a fag 
are to cook breakfast and supper in the 
house kitchen and serve it in his master's 
room; but in many of the houses the 
boys eat all their meals together, except 
tea, which is always served in the sepa- 
rate rooms ; so the fags have very little 
to do in return for the friendship of 
the older boys. In the past, to be sure,, 
the system of fagging was often grossly 
abused ; and even to - day it is, like all 
good institutions, liable to abuse ; yet al- 
together too much has been said about 
its tyranny and brutality. Most small 
boys are glad enough to be with the 
big boys, and a Senior who plays foot- 
ball or rows well may have as many 
youngsters to wait on him as he chooses. 

F 81 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Fag -masters are often the fags' best 
friends, and even at the universities 
afterwards keep a kindly eye upon them. 
Sometimes it happens that a fag turns 
out a great cricketer or oarsman, in 
which case his old fag -master is as 
proud of him as of a younger brother. 
Or, like as not, in after-life a country 
parson can look back upon the time 
when he fagged the bishop of his dio- 
cese. In a speech made in 1896 by Lord 
Rosebery, late Prime Minister of Eng- 
land, there is an amusing reference to 
fagging : " It is a long time since you 
and I, Mr. Chairman" (Mr. Acland, 
Minister of Education), " first met. I 
have always been a little under your 
presidence, because I began as your fag 
at Eton, and I little thought, when I 
poached your eggs and made your tea, 
that we were destined to meet under 
these very dissimilar circumstances." 



ETON 

Lord Kosebery then went on to make 
some suggestions to Mr. Acland " with 
all that humility which befits our former 
relations." There can be no doubt that 
every one laughed heartily at this, and 
that it helped very much in getting a 
hearing for his suggestion. 

The pleasantest thing about living in 
one of the "houses" is that one soon 
gets to know a lot of fellows and to be 
fond of them. The boys are kept very 
much together by their meals and the 
early hour of "lock-up"; while chapel, 
frequent school - hours, and "absences" 
— that is, roll-calls ; in fact, presentses — 
keep them from spending much time 
away from the school. As a result, the 
fellows in a house stick together like 
brothers. Each house has its debating 
society, its football and cricket teams, 
and perhaps its " house four " on the 
river. And where there is so much 



SCHOOL BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

loyalty it is only natural that rivalry 
among the houses should be keen. Ten 
times as many boys go into athletic 
contests as in America, and even if a 
boy didn't know a soul outside of his 
house, he need never become lonesome, 
and seldom homesick. 



v. — DISCIPLINE 

Discipline at Eton is mainly enforced, 
as at Winchester, by the sixth form — 
that is to say, by the oldest and best 
pupils in the school. The duties which 
at Winchester fall to the prefects are 
in the main performed by prepostors. 
The duties of the Prefect of Hall are 
performed by the Captain of the College. 
The oppidans also have a captain, who 
is responsible in general for their be- 
havior. Though the spheres of the 

84 



ETON 

two captains are wholly distinct, the 
Captain of the College is generally con- 
sidered to hold the higher rank. Each 
of the houses has a captain, as the Win- 
chester houses have each a prefect. Of 
course it does not always happen that 
the boy who leads in scholarship is man 
enough to rule the rest ; but if he is not, 
the leading athletes step in and take 
matters into their own hands. 

What Wykehamists call funding 
Etonians call smacking. One old Eton- 
ian told me that he used to have to put 
his head under a table while the captain 
rushed across the room with uplifted 
rod. He added that though the smack- 
ing sometimes raised blood-bruises, the 
worst part of the punishment was the 
suspense of waiting between blows with 
your head under the table. So ingenious 
and severe a punishment, however, is 
unusual. The offences punished by 
85 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

smacking are disorder and disobedience 
in the house; and it speaks well for 
Eton discipline that the average boy is 
not smacked more than half a dozen 
times during his six years at school. 

Many people, of course, think bodily 
punishment brutal, and especially ob- 
ject to having the older boys beat the 
younger. Yet I never knew a public- 
school boy or a master who did not ap- 
prove of it as practised nowadays. In 
fact, you could hardly enlist the older 
boys on the side of law and order with- 
out giving them a means of discipline 
which the younger boys respect ; and if 
you didn't do this, you would have to 
sacrifice many of the best features of 
public-school life. Like the system of 
fagging, the discipline enforced by the 
sixth form is at bottom more humane 
than the neglect from which so many 
boys suffer in American schools. 
83 



ETON 

In former times much of the disci- 
pline was administered by the head- 
master. A certain Dr. Keate, who was 
head-master towards the middle of this 
century, is celebrated for his floggings. 
A characteristic instance occurred when 
a very popular boy, named Munro, was 
dismissed from school for refusing to be 
flogged. At the next " absence," when 
his name was omitted from the roll-call, 
his friends set up a shout of " Munro ! 
Munro ! Boo, boo !" In punishment for 
this they were told to come daily to an 
extra absence. This they decided not 
to do, and also determined not to be 
flogged for it. Keate very craftily 
waited until after " lock-up," when the 
boys were scattered in the various 
boarding-houses, and then sent the as- 
sistant-masters to fetch them for pun- 
ishment in relays. Some of the boys 
tried to organize resistance by shouting 
87 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

from the windows : " Don't be flogged ! 
We haven't been flogged !" but the re- 
lays kept coming in to Keate until after 
midnight, and all but two of the boys 
were flogged — over eighty in all. Ac- 
cording to tradition, Keate was positive- 
ly fond of using the birch. On one oc- 
casion, it is said, the names, of a batch 
of candidates for Confirmation were by 
mistake sent to him on a " bill " like 
that used for reporting boys for punish- 
ment. The boys tried to explain the 
matter, but Keate only flogged them 
the harder for what he considered a 
sacreligious trick to escape punishment. 
All this happened in the time when the 
boys lived under " dames " in the board- 
ing-houses. As the school life has be- 
come better regulated and the care of 
the boys has come more and more into 
the hands of the masters, the discipline 
of the prepostors and captains has be- 



ETON 

come better. The head-master has only 
half a dozen boys or so to swish each 
term. 

This system of discipline is clearly 
the same in essence as that which 
William of Wykeham framed so many 
}^ears ago. And at Eton, as at Win- 
chester, it has taught generations of 
boys the two essential principles of 
self-government — the obedience to law 
"and the enforcement of law. In the 
case of the boys who become captains, 
the masters say they often see a distinct 
change in character. Fellows who are 
naturally diffident or unthinking are 
made resolute or thoughtful by the 
responsibility intrusted to them. Mr. 
Ruskin has somewhere said that Ger- 
mans are born students, Italians born 
artists, and Englishmen born captains. 
Nothing illustrates this saying more 
clearly, as applied to Englishmen, than 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the manner in which the very school- 
boys of the nation have justified their 
right to govern themselves. Yet we 
must not forget that the system in 
vogue at Winchester and Eton has 
taken centuries to develop into its pres- 
ent admirable form ; and I have gone 
into the history of its development in 
order to make it more clearly under- 
stood. As long as the commoners at 
Winchester were living in a single large- 
community, discipline was hard to main- 
tain ; and as long as the oppidans at 
Eton lived in mere boarding-houses 
there was plenty of flogging for the 
masters to do. The perfection of the 
system now in vogue was not reached 
until the boys were divided up into 
definite communities small enough 
to feel their individuality, and were 
placed under masters sufficiently wise 
and strong to have a personal iniiu- 
90 



ETON 

ence over each of the boys in their 
charge. 

VI. — ETON SCHOOL SOCIETIES 

In most of the public schools, as at 
Winchester, the social life is mainly in 
the houses. Eton, however, is so large 
that it supports several school societies. 
The most important of these is The 
Eton Society, or " Pop," as it is gener- 
ally called. When Pop was founded, 
early in the present century, its aim 
was purely literary. Mr. Gladstone re- 
lates that in his time they used to elect 
now and then a solid athletic man, be- 
cause they believed in encouraging 
sports. To-day Pop still holds debates ; 
but it has grown almost exclusively 
athletic. One of the younger masters 
told me that as a boy he and a few 
others succeeded in electing a Captain 

91 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

of the College who, though a good fel- 
low, was not an athlete ; but that to do 
it, they had to blackball everybody else 
till their man got in. Present members 
say that only good athletes are elected. 
The clever fellows have a society of 
their own, which is much what Pop 
was at first. 

The members of Pop are mainly the 
cricketers who play against Winchester 
and Harrow, and the boating-men who 
row for and often win the Ladies' Plate 
at Henley. These together make, say, 
twenty ; and eight more or so are chosen 
from the fellows who represent the 
school in the Eton games of football, 
which are so different from all other 
games of football that they can be 
played only among themselves. You 
must not think, however, that a man 
will get on Pop merely for being a 
great athlete. He must be a first-rate 



ETON 

fellow besides, and, as it happens, there 
are always a number of clever men and 
good scholars among the athletes in the 
society. In a word, Pop is the best so- 
ciety that can be made up from the 
athletic men, and is even more purely 
athletic than the Yale senior societies, 
the Dickey at Harvard or Vincent's at 
Oxford. 

The authority Pop exercises over the 
school, though so peculiar as to be diffi- 
cult to describe, is enormous. It is as 
great, for instance, as that of the three 
Senior societies at Yale, and is shown in 
much the same way. Yet such revolts 
of public opinion as have occurred of 
late at Yale — for instance, during the 
discussion of the undergraduate rule — 
are unknown. It would be more just 
to compare Pop to the Yale Senior so- 
cieties at their prime — that is, before 
the university began to outgrow them. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The most obvious way in which Pop 
affects Eton life is, of course, in mat- 
ters of school discipline. Such offences 
as do not come directly within the 
province of the captains or the masters 
Pop deals with in no faint-hearted man- 
ner. For instance, some years ago a 
boy who had gone with the Eton elev- 
en to Winchester amused himself huge- 
ly by sending home bogus telegrams 
about the match, and kept the fellows 
swarming about the bulletin-boards at 
Eton in anxious suspense. Now there 
is nothing an English boy likes better 
than a hoax, but not about serious 
subjects. When that youngster got 
back to Eton, Pop smacked him sound- 
ly — or, in the Eton phrase, he was 
"Pop -caned." On another occasion, 
when a number of boys had been ex- 
pelled for a very serious offence which 
had been proved against them, one of 
94 



ETON 

them made an imposing exit in a drag, 
with a flourish of coaching bugles, at 
an hour when the street in front of 
the college was swarming with boys. 
Being a popular fellow, he was loudly 
cheered. For this outbreak against the 
action of the masters the ringleaders 
of the cheering were Pop-caned. 

At most American schools and uni- 
versities, such societies as Pop form al- 
most the entire social life ; but in Eng- 
land the members never lose loyalty for 
the house or the college they belong to. 
This is the reason why at Eton Pop 
has such a strong and good influence 
over the rest of the school. In Ameri- 
ca> when a man gets into a leading so- 
ciety he is naturally and almost inevi- 
tably drawn away from his earlier and 
less fortunate friends, so that the school 
or university is split up into two parts 
— those who are in things and those 
95 



SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

who are not. Very often, too, as at 
Harvard, those who are in things are 
divided among themselves, so that there 
is no unity of spirit. Our societies 
will, of course, always exist ; but their 
evil influence might be destroyed, and 
their good influence strengthened, by 
forming the school into houses as soon 
as the boys arrive, and the universities 
into something like colleges. 



VII. — THE ETON SPIRIT 

The Eton spirit-, as I have pointed 
out, is not free from class prejudice. 
Yet class prejudice, it must be remem- 
bered, is strong in England everywhere ; 
and though to us it is very hateful, we 
must admit, if we are honest, that in 
any given class there is apt to be more 
democracy in England than with us. 



ETON 

If an Eton boy is a gentleman by birth 
and instinct, he need be nothing more. 
At Oxford and Cambridge Lord So-and- 
so may find his way where plain So- 
and-so cannot go ; but English school- 
boys refuse to give way to mere lords 
and earls. A tradesman once told me 
of the experience of the little Earl 
of Blank, who used to present his card 
when buying things. The other boys 
found it out, followed him from shop to 
shop, and booted him every time he did 
it. "All the same," said the tradesman, 
"it is awkward when a nobleman tells 
you his plain name, and you send the 
goods to Blank, Esq." As often as not 
one gets to know a fellow pretty well 
before finding out that he has a title. 
The. little Princes of Connaught, and 
even the Duke of Albany, will boil their 
own kettles for tea, and do duty as fag 
like any one else; and as inferiors and 
g 97 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

as captains they will be judged by the 
same standard as their school -fellows. 
It was not only on the playing-fields 
of Eton that the battle of Waterloo 
was won. It was in the school-rooms 
and houses as well. 



VIII. — RELICS OF ETON LIFE 

Instructive as the ordering of a boy's 
life at Eton is, the most delightful feat- 
ures of the school are those which sug- 
gest the daily life and sports of all the 
generations that have left their boy- 
hood behind in this joyous and sad lit- 
tle town on the banks of the Thames. 
There is scarcely a stone in the quad- 
rangle, or a clod in the fields that lie 
about it, which could not tell of frolic 
and adventure. If the system of disci- 
pline which I have been describing had 



ETON 

no other virtue, it would be enough that 
it leads to wholesome and pleasant living 
in the days when men are sensitive as 
they never will be again to joy and to 
sorrow. 

The most interesting part of the 
buildings are the school-rooms, which 
stand to-day almost precisely as they 
were built. It gives you a queer feeling 
to think how many boys and how many 
generations of boys have sat on those 
benches at Arma virumque cano, or 
trying to drum the 6, ?j, to into heads 
that are already overflowing with 
dreams of fresh breezes on the river 
and of the sound of the cricket-ball on 
the playing-fields. 

On the wood-work of the rooms you 
will find the names of the boys who 
have studied here. On this post you 
can read M. Wesley, which, Etonians 
will tell you, is the way Arthur Welles- 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ley, Duke of Wellington, used to write 
his name. Pitt carved his name twice, 
in modest little italics. Charles James 
Fox sprawled his in bold capitals high 
up on the panelled wainscot. Many of 
these famous names stand in a group 
of their school friends — a poet between 
a banker and a soldier, all bo} T s to- 
gether — and among these many an- 
other, perhaps the most popular of all 
the boys at school, of whose name the 
world has never heard. 

The most interesting of the names, to 
me at least, was that of the poet Shelley. 
Each letter is plainly, even boldly form- 
ed ; and yet they all huddle together so 
nervously that they seem to shrink from 
being seen. As you look at them, you 
call to mind the courage and indepen- 
dence that made Shelley, mere stripling 
that he was, refuse to be fagged, and 
then his pitiful plight when the fag- 
100 



ETON 

masters got up " Shelley baits," and 
hunted him like a driven beast through 
the town : you can almost see his pale 
cheeks and his lustrous eyes. 

In one side of Shelley's life at Eton, 
it is possible to find some little enjoy- 
ment. He was interested in natural 
science, and with all the mad fervor of 
his soul would go any length to bring 
off an experiment. Once he laid a train 
of gunpowder to the roots of a decaying 
tree, and lighted it by means of a burn- 
ing-glass. The charred stump of the tree 
long survived as a monument of Shel- 
ley's deviltry. On another occasion, 
when he was busy in his bedroom at 
the dead of night — in spite of the fact 
that experiments were forbidden in the 
boys' chambers — he upset a frying-pan 
full of ingredients into the fire, with 
consequences that awoke everybody in 
the house. His tutor caught wind of the 
101 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

way in which he was spending his time, 
and invaded Shelley's laboratory. Find- 
ing him at work trying to make blue 
flames, he angrily asked what he was 
doing. "Eaising the devil," answered 
Shelley. The tutor grasped a mysterious 
implement on the table, and was violent- 
ly thrown against the wall. The im- 
plement was a highly charged electric 
machine. So Shelley was not without 
his compensation, even though he was 
misunderstood and was oppressed by 
the system of fagging, which he failed 
either to appreciate or understand. It 
all makes you feel very unsteady in the 
heart and in the throat as you see the 
history of it recorded in those bold, 
frightened letters, which make up the 
name of a magnificent, harassed little 
boy, a name which is now one of the 
greatest in the roll of the world's great 
men ! 

102 



ETOX 

Gladstone's name near by is more 
typical of those men whom the world 
finds it easy to understand. It is carved 
in small letters, which are huddled to- 
gether for the lack of room, yet each 
one of them is as correct and irre- 
proachable as the carving of an epi- 
taph. 

And so they are, so to speak, the 
epitaph of the brave old custom of 
carving your own name, for since his 
time you have to pay ten shillings when 
you leave school, and have a carver do 
it for you. These carved names are 
still arranged in groups of friends ; and 
sometimes you will find a boy's name 
where his father and grandfather placed 
theirs ; but they are all as like as so 
many types in a font ; not one of them 
tells you a syllable about what kind of 
a boy the owner was. It would be so 
much better to allow each boy a certain 

103 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

space, and let him carve his own name 
the day he leaves. 

A room near by is the place of the 
famous Eton flogging- block. It was 
here that the zealous Dr. Keate by mis- 
take birched the candidates for confirma- 
tion ; and here also thousands of boys 
have been flogged first and last for of- 
fences more or less notable. I do not 
doubt that most of them have profited 
by their discipline, but not a few of them 
must have been embittered and broken 
in spirit. 

Yet there is a joke connected even 
with the block. One night a lot of 
old Etonians, headed by a certain Lord 
Waterford, who had been making merry 
after a boat-race, broke into the room 
where the block was kept and carried 
it off to London. There they rented 
rooms and founded the " Eton Block 
Club," to which no one could belong 
104 



ETON 

who had not been swished on that block 
while at school. 

IX. — KACKETS AND FIVES 

In the quadrangle outside every one 
would notice the splendid chapel; but 
to any one interested in school-boy life 
and sports it has a particular interest. 
The spaces between the broad, deep but- 
tresses have long been used as fives- 
courts. Any day, if you watch the Eton 
boys coming out of the schools, you will 
see some one of them dive into his 
trousers-pocket — he has no side-pockets 
in his jacket, poor fellow ! — and, pro- 
ducing a rubber ball, challenge a com- 
rade. The two clatter across the flint 
cobbles and secure a space of the chapel- 
wall between two buttresses. They take 
off their tall silk hats, which are already, 
perhaps, furred like a fighting black 
105 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

tomcat, and throw them down at the 
foot of the buttresses. Then they bat 
the ball backwards and forwards be- 
tween the buttresses and the chapel- 
wall, using not their hands but a Latin 
Composition, or a Euclid. The chapel 
buttresses have been used in this way 
ever since Henry the Sixth built them, 
over four hundred years ago. At least, 
if they haven't they ought to have been. 
The two buttresses which stand at the 
foot of the chapel-stairs have a platform 
in front, so that there is room for four 
boys to play. The court they form is 
the cradle of the modern game of fives, 
for when the first fives -courts were 
built at Eton in 1840, every nook in it 
was so dear to the players and was so 
much a part of the game that it was 
reproduced exactly. For instance, the 
balustrade of the chapel-steps projects 
into the court. In the new courts a pro- 
106 



jection like this was built, even to the 
very capping and hand-rail. At some 
of the other public schools the fives- 
courts are plain; but as the "pepper- 
box," as the projecting balustrade is 
called, makes a more skilful and inter- 
esting game, the Eton court is being 
pretty generally adopted elsewhere. 
When fives -courts were built for the 
Harvard University baseball - players, 
all the features of the Eton chapel court 
were reproduced. To-day Eton has 
fifty fives -courts, and almost every 
" house " has a court of its own. On a 
Avinter's day all these courts are filled, 
and when the annual matches are on 
among the houses, the walk in front of 
them is lined with boys watching. 

Rackets is played at Eton, but is more 
popular at Harrow, where almost every 
house has a court of its own called a 
" squash court," because the ball used is 

107 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

made of hollow rubber. The game is, 
of course, much slower and easier than 
the hard-ball rackets, but it is far better 
on that account for small boys, and 
moreover it teaches them the ABC of 
the game so thoroughly that when they 
come to the big courts with their lively 
balls and lightning-like play they easily 
excel. Since 1868 matches among the 
leading public schools have been held 
yearly at London, and in these Harrow 
has been for the most part successful. 
A great proportion of the amateur cham- 
pions in England have been "old Har- 
rovians." One reason why fives and 
rackets are so popular in the schools 
is that tennis and lawn - tennis are not 
played. 

In America, where all out-door games 
are impossible for over half of term- 
time, fives or rackets ought to be pop- 
ular. At present, however, no school — 
108 



ETON 

or university either, for that matter — 
has a racket - court, except St. Paul's. 
The two fives -courts at Harvard were 
very wisely built to teach the baseball 
men quickness, and to keep them well 
exercised during the winter ; but the 
men have never used the courts much, 
and so little is known of the real sport 
of the game that a few months ago the 
" pepper-boxes" were laboriously torn 
out to make the courts better ! Har- 
vard undergraduates play handball in a 
rude way in the gymnasium, but many 
of them do not even know of the exist- 
ence of the fives-courts. If they would 
organize a fives club, build in the pepper- 
boxes, and set the game going, it might 
by-and-by be played in every school and 
college in the country. A half -hour of 
brisk exercise and a bath on a dull day 
are so much better than tobacco and 
cards, or even loafing before a fire. And 

109 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

if the boys cannot induce the masters to 
provide for in-door sports in winter, it is 
time for parents to step in. 



x. — BOATING 

Eton is the leading, one might al- 
most say the only, boating - school of 
England. Westminster used to row 
very well in the forties, and even beat 
Eton at times ;. but the Thames at Lon- 
don soon became so choked with traffic 
that the sport was destroyed ; and by- 
and-by the races had to be given up 
because Westminster rowed so badly. 
At Winchester the boys row on the 
Itchen, where old Ike Walton used to 
fish so pleasantly ; but, as somebody has 
remarked, the bottom is so near the top 
that when they row it isn't Itchen but 
scratchin'. The Harpur School at Bed- 
no 



ETON 

ford, which is commonly called the Bed- 
ford Grammar School, usually gets out 
an eight for the Ladies' Plate at Henley, 
but never wins more than a heat. Kad- 
ley, which is fortunate in being situated 
on the Isis just below Oxford, made a 
good race with Eton as early as 1858, 
and still rows creditably for the Ladies' 
Plate, but has never won. Eton is the 
only school where boating has anything 
like the prominence it enjoys at the 
universities. In this respect it is like 
our own St. Paul's— both furnish the 
backbone of the great university crews. 
In England a single eight often con- 
tains as many as five old Etonians. The 
story of boating at Eton is the story of 
boating in the public schools, and, as it 
happens, will teach us, more than any- 
thing else perhaps, how the English 
athletic spirit sprang up and reached 
its present wonderful development, 
ill 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The first element in boating at Eton 
is the river Thames, which separates 
the school from the castle and park 
of Windsor. Ever since the school be- 
gan, I suppose, the boys have played 
hookey to go fishing and swimming. 
By-and-by some of the more adventu- 
rous prevailed upon the watermen to 
keep guns for them, and stole away 
before "early school," or during play 
hours, to go shooting. Even as early as 
the last century masters who caught 
boys shooting winked at the fact that 
the river was " out of bounds," and 
merely admonished them that fire-arras 
are dangerous. In fact, the human nat- 
ure in both boys and masters cried out 
that the river was made to be enjoyed, 
and in the face of bookfuls of rules crews 
began practising. 

Only one Head Master, Dr. Keate, 



112 



ETON 

to make a stand against boating. Hear- 
ing that an eight was planning an ex- 
pedition on the river, he threatened to 
expel any one who joined it, and at the 
appointed time went out on the towing- 
path for a stroll. A crew dressed like the 
Eton eight and wearing masks issued 
from the Brocas, as the neighborhood 
of the boat-houses is called. Catching up 
with them, Dr. Keate shouted : " Fool- 
ish boys, I know you all. Lord 

I know you. A , you had better 

come ashore. Come here, or you will 
all be expelled." The only answer was 
the hooting of boys stationed behind 
hedges. The crew rowed on — follow- 
ed by several masters on horseback — 
and finally disembarking, took off their 
masks, and gave a loud " Hurrah !" It 
was an eight of watermen whom the boys 
had induced to impose on the masters. 
Keate declared that there should be no 

H 113 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IX ENGLAND 

Easter holiday unless the boys who had 
hooted him gave themselves up. Some 
twenty of them were " swished." Yet 
the sentiment in favor of the sport was 
so strong that no subsequent master 
risked ridicule by interfering at the 
Brocas. Thus the old rule placing the 
river out of bounds for the boys came 
to mean only that the masters must 
keep away from it. 

The first formal recognition of boating 
was due to the drowning of one of the 
boys in 1840. After this certain mas- 
ters were given charge of the river, 
watermen were engaged to teach swim- 
ming, patrol the banks, and no boy was 
allowed on the river who had not 
" passed." " Passing " — the pleasantest 
passing a boy has to study for — is one 
of the prettiest ceremonies on the river. 
The master stands on Acropolis — a high 
place near the swimming -hole. The 
114 



ETON 

waterman presents his pupils, non nants, 
undressed in a punt. At a word from 
the master, each in turn plunges in, 
swims about thirty yards to a pole 
stuck in the water, which is " over his 
head," and then back to the punt. His 
"form" must be so good as to insure 
that he is capable of swimming in his 
clothes. Since "passing" was estab- 
lished, only one boy has been drowned, 
and boating has become the most popu- 
lar sport in the school. 

Oddly enough, however, a boy could 
still be punished for being caught out 
of bounds on his way to and from the 
river ; but as the masters were as good 
sportsmen as the boys, all the boating 
men had to do on meeting a master was 
to dodge into a shop. Sometimes, com- 
ing up from the river, a crowd of boys 
would overhaul a master walking in the 
same direction. Then all they did was 
115 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to slow up, and march into bounds in 
solemn procession at the great man's 
heels. Of course the master knew 
what was going on, but he chose not to 
see it for fear of having to punish it. 
This custom was called " shirking." In 
1860 the captain of the boats, whose 
position and authority I shall explain 
later, plucked up courage to beard the 
Head Master with the common-sense re 
quest that the boys who were rowing 
regularly in " the boats " might go and 
come from the Brocas without "shirk- 
ing." The request was granted, and 
presently the freedom of the river was 
extended to the whole school. 

The races rowed at Eton are innumer- 
able. To begin with, there are two kinds 
of rowing : " pulling," for pairs, in which 
each man has a sweep, and " single scull- 
ing." In "lower-boy pulling" the course 
is a mile and return. The boats are of 
116 



ETON 

cedar and quite heavy, and have fixed 
seats and a coxswain. In "lower-boy 
sculling" the course is the same, and 
the boats used are whiffs. In "junior 
pulling" and "junior sculling" the boats 
are lighter, carry no coxwains, and the 
course is a mile and a half and return. 
In "school pulling" and "school scull- 
ing" the course is the same as in the 
junior events, and the boats are also 
the same except that sliding seats are 
used. The number of heats rowed in 
each event, especially the " lower boy " 
and " novice " races, is appalling ; yet 
each heat brings out a number of fol- 
lowers who run along the towing-path 
shouting at the top of their lungs. Be- 
sides these there are races every year 
between six or seven fours chosen from 
the leading "houses," in which the 
boats, though light, have fixed seats. 
Here the rivalry is even more intense, 
117 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

and every heat crowds the towing-path 
with what an American school -boy 
would call " rooters." 

When a visitor to Eton goes down to 
the towing-path along the Brocas to see 
the pulling and sculling races, his host 
will tell him that no man is allowed to 
enter the " school " pulling and scull- 
ing who is not in the " upper boats." 
The manner in which he says this im- 
plies that " to be in the boats " is some- 
thing very distinguished ; but nobody 
but an Etonian, I suppose, can ever quite 
grasp the vastness of its importance. 

In the first place, there are three " up- 
per boats " and seven " lower boats "; 
and none but fifth and sixth form boys 
are ever admitted to them, however 
well they row. On the other hand, 
there is no favoritism shown, so that a 
good oar is sure of his place. The one 
exception to this is in the case of the 
118 



ETON 

captain of the cricket eleven, who, out 
of compliment, is usually asked to take 
a place in the highest of the "upper 
boats " — the ten-oared Monarch. 

The special training to get into the 
boats is furnished by the novice eights. 
About a hundred boating -men post 
their names as candidates. The big 
oarsmen then take them out in scratch 
eights, each of which is stroked by a 
"lower boatsman." The best of the 
candidates are chosen for the novice 
eights. The races are three-quarters 
of a mile — from Sandbank to Windsor 
Bridge — and the boats used are heavy 
and have fixed seats. The successful 
candidates " get their boats." 

What they do after they get their 

boats, except to wear a rather jaunty 

uniform, with the name of their special 

boat on their hat - band, is not at first 

119 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

easy to understand ; but when one 
learns how much real pleasure there is 
in idling about the Thames, the desira- 
bility of being in the boats becomes im- 
aginable ; and on one occasion, at least, 
the boats cut a very important figure. 
This is the Fourth of June, a da} 7 which 
no true Etonian ever fails to celebrate 
on this side of the grave. On this 
day the shade trees of the quiet little 
town are in full, rich verdure, the win- 
dow - sills of the houses blossom into 
flower-gardens, and all Eton, so to 
speak, puts on its white waistcoat and 
boutonniere. The town is filled to over- 
flowing with gayly dressed mothers and 
sisters; the river swarms with craft, 
and house -boats line its shores. Two 
years ago the Duke and Duchess of 
York came over from the royal castle 
of Windsor to grace the occasion. The} 7 
were met by volunteers from the Eton 
120 



ETON 

Bifle Corps, headed by the corps band ; 
and later in the day one of the boys 
read an address of welcome, beginning : 

"Sailor and prince — and if aught else be dear 
To English hearts. ..." 

Luncheon is served in the College Hall, 
and after toasts are drunk all gather in 
the playing-fields to chat, listen to the 
music, and, perhaps, watch the game of 
cricket. At four o'clock comes chapel, 
and afterwards the boys serve straw- 
berry-mess and tea to as many guests 
as can be got into their nine-by-twelve 
rooms. 

Then all the frocks, parasols, brass 
bands, white waistcoats, and button- 
holes swarm to the river to celebrate 
the departure of the boats for Surly. 
This is conducted with almost military 
pomp. When the boats arrive at Surly 
dinner is served under tents on the 

131 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

meadow opposite Surly Hall. After 
this they all row back. To the Ameri- 
can mind it all seems at first sight to 
be very much like the King of France 
with forty thousand men who marched 
up the hill and then marched down 
again ; but no English boy would think 
so. The return of the boats in the 
evening is hailed by Roman candles 
and rockets, and squibs are sent rico- 
chetting over the surface of the water. 
It is recorded that, in 1824, George Can- 
ning, the famous Prime Minister, accom- 
panied the boats as a "sitter," or pas- 
senger, in the ten-oared Monarch, and 
though he had never been known to 
tremble at the helm of empire, he gave 
unmistakable signs of alarm as the boats 
pressed about him and fireworks darted 
towards him over the waves. 

The excitement of the celebration is 
felt literally around the world. At the 
122 



ETON 

universities every college is likely to 
have its foregathering, and the Eton 
Boating-song and Floreat Etona ring 
through the quadrangles. The follow- 
ing telegrams, which the Head Master, 
Dr. Warre, received last year, speak for 
themselves : 



-Head Master, Eton. Sonent voces 
omnium Floreat Etona ! Plumer, White, Ben- 
son, Drummond, Villiers, Brand, Beresford — 
Etonians." 

"Gibraltar. — Dr. Warre, Eton College, Wind- 
sor. Benefacti memores concinamus Etonenses 
apud Calpem ! Jell" 

" Dalhousie.— -Warre, Eton, England. Floreat 
Etona ! Gosling, Pechell, Crum, Jelf, Pechell — 
Rifles !" 

"Head Master, Eton. — Fourteen Etonians hav- 
ing sock supper. Government House, Sydney." 

" Warre, Eton. — Twelve Etonians send greet- 
ing, Floreat Etona ! Brassey. Melbourne. 

"Kandy. — Warre, Eton. Ceylon Old Etonians, 
dining here to-night, send greetings. Robson. 
123 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

On such an occasion, the King of 
France, or any other king, might well 
row to Surly and back. 

One must not infer, however, that 
Eton boating is an affair of fireworks, 
uniforms, and sock suppers. To begin 
with, the order in which the seven 
"lower boats" proceed to Surly is de- 
termined by bumping - races like those 
between the colleges at Oxford and 
Cambridge ; and though these were an 
innovation last year, they bid fair to 
become a fixture and to awaken consid- 
erable rivalry. And above and beyond 
the pomp of Eton boating is the Eton 
eight, which competes for the Ladies' 
Plate at Henley in July. In England 
they make a distinction between boat- 
ing and rowing. 

The father of rowing is the present 
Head Master, Dr. Warre. When he 
came to Eton as a tutor, in 1860, the 
124 



ETON 

captain of the boats asked him to teach 
the eight the stroke in use at the uni- 
versities. He consented, and kept on 
coaching for twenty-four years — that is, 
until he became Head Master, by which 
time, it may be believed, rowing tradi- 
tions were well established. 

The method of selecting the eight is 
much the same as at the universities; 
and Mr. Lehmann, the old Cambridge 
oarsman who has come over to coach 
Harvard, has introduced it in America. 
In the Easter term sixteen men are 
selected from the best oars in the " up- 
per boats," and are divided as evenly as 
possible into two crews, called "trial 
eights." The first and second captains 
of the boats coach them, but do not 
compete. The course is about as long 
as the Henley course. The men who 
show up best in the "trials" are selected 
for the eight. After this the crew trains 
125 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

regularly on a clear stretch of water 
some distance from the Brocas. On the 
last days before Henley, however, they 
do their work in the sight of the whole 
school, and you can guess the enthusi- 
asm they arouse. 

The glorious permission to row at Hen- 
ley was gained by Mr. Warre in 1861, 
the second year of his coaching. Such 
a privilege could not come without con- 
cessions. Under the old regime the boys 
had held "Check Nights" at Surly. 
These were feasts of duck and green 
pease, which were carried on with much 
ceremony, and perhaps disorder. When 
the crew was allowed to go to Henley 
the boys promised to give up " Check 
Nights," as well as another occasion of 
riot called " Oppidan Dinner." 

The race Eton enters at Henley is 
the Ladies' Plate, which is open only 
to public schools and colleges — not to 
126 



boat clubs from town, or to univer- 
sity crews. In the first two years Eton 
beat Kadley (school), and in the third 
year beat Trinity Hall (Cambridge) and 
Brasenose (Oxford). The fourth year 
she won the Ladies' Plate. Since then 
Eton has won the plate about a dozen 
times, and of late years has always 
been the most prominent competitor. 
Last year the eight contained three sons 
of Dr. Warre; and after watching it 
train at Eton, and becoming its violent 
partisan, I found that my own college, 
in which there was an older son of the 
Head Master's, came against it in the 
finals. It was a case of divided loyalty 
all round, but the perfection and ease 
with which the crew in light-blue rowed 
down the Oxonians made it impossible 
not to be entirely satisfied with the 
result. In fact, the college eight itself 
did not take defeat very much to heart. 
127 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

One of the men admitted to me that 
they had been outclassed. " You must 
remember," he said, " that those boys 
(no one is allowed to stay at Eton after 
nineteen) have rowed seven to nine 
years, and are older oarsmen than most 
of our men. Besides," he added, with a 
smile, " three of them are coming up to 
Balliol next year." I thought his good 
sense and good feeling very charming. 

Whenever Eton has an especially 
fine crew it goes in for the Grand Chal- 
lenge Cup. Two years ago it entered 
in the hope of being drawn against 
Cornell, and last year it did the same 
in the hope of meeting Yale. If either 
of the American crews had been rowing 
in their true form such an act would 
have been an unbearable presumption, 
and, as it was, it made people smile. I 
could not help wondering, however, 
what would have been the result of 
128 



ETON 

a heat with the disordered American 
crews. Certainty, so far as style is 
concerned, no crew at Henley is better 
than Eton. 

The captain of the eight is almost al- 
ways the man who has been in the boat 
longest ; and by virtue of his office he 
is also captain of the boats. Among all 
dignitaries of the public schools he is the 
greatest "swell." In boating matters, 
he has unlimited power, not only over 
the selection of the members of the 
boats, but in financial questions. When 
the captain of the boats of 1861 abol- 
ished Check Nights and Oppidan Din- 
ners, he never dreamed that any one 
might object. If he is anything of a 
football-player he is always asked to 
play in the match between the colleges 
and oppidans ; and he plays in the crick- 
et-match whether he is any good or not. 
His position, more than anything else 
i 129 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

I know, shows the dignity and impor- 
tance of athletics in the public schools. 
This little history of Eton boating is 
as English as can be. Anybody who 
understands the spirit of adventure that 
led to the use of the river, the ridiculous 
conservatism that necessitated "shirk- 
ing," and the radical good sense that 
led the masters to barter abuses on the 
part of the boys for permission to win 
glory for the school at Henley has the 
key-note of the development of British 
institutions. 



xi. — CRICKET 

Of all the sports cultivated at Eton, 
cricket has the fewest peculiar features. 
This is not because it is the least popular 
game, but because it is the most popular. 
There is no cricket but cricket; and all 
England is its prophet ! It is played 
130 



ETON 

in fields and parks and byways. As 
you whiz through the country on the 
hysterical little railway-trains the way- 
side swarms with men, boys, and chil- 
dren in white trousers. It is played in 
the morning and in the afternoon ; in 
the long summer evenings it is often al- 
most nine o'clock before the stumps are 
drawn. It is played on week-days and 
it is played on Sundays : even the par- 
sons — at least, the most radical of them 
— do not scruple at times to come out 
for a game with the boys of their Sun- 
day-schools after evening service. It 
is played, I had almost said, from the 
cradle to the grave. Certainly the best 
and most popular player in England to- 
day, Dr. "W. G. Grace, has a son on the 
Cambridge eleven. And it is recorded 
that a famous cricketer once excused a 
younger brother's lack of skill by say- 
ing, " He never had a chance to learn 
131 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

the game. He was so ill that he couldn't 
begin playing until he was six years old." 
If a boy isn't a past-master at ericket be- 
fore he comes to Eton there is little hope 
for him. 

How much most school-boys do play 
cricket may be seen in the time and 
space they give to the game. At Eton 
there are seven different grounds, each 
with a name of its own. The most ex- 
alted of these is Upper Club, where the 
best twenty-two players in the school 
hold their matches and the school eleven 
plays its home games. Then there are 
Middle Club, Lower Club, Upper Six- 
penny, Lower Sixpenny, and a lot more, 
the names and offices of which no trav- 
eller's pride could have induced me to 
learn. Every " house," in fact, has its 
eleven, and, for all I know, its separate 
field. In all, the Eton cricket-grounds 
cover forty-two acres, and afford room 

132 



ETON 

for a score and more of games. Almost 
five hundred boys can play cricket there 
at once. 

To enumerate the matches played be- 
tween home teams each year would be 
impossible. Most of them take place 
between the natural divisions of the 
school. Each house has, of course, its 
eleven. At Eton the all-absorbing con- 
test is between the Senior Oppidan and 
College elevens. 

The best of the players in this match, 
of course, represent the school ; but long 
beforehand, at the very beginning of the 
season, a match is held, the purpose of 
which is to sift the players. The best 
twenty-two men are divided as equalry 
as possible into two elevens, and made 
to show what they are good for. The 
eleven selected from the players in this 
game henceforth represent the school, 
and are privileged to wear the school 
133 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

colors. At Eton the boating interest 
dominates, but in all the other schools 
the cricketers are the acknowledged 
" swells." And even at Eton they can 
scarcely be said to be of less importance 
than the school eight. 

The matches the school elevens play 
are many and various — against the clubs 
of neighboring towns, against gentle- 
men who live near by, against officers 
of neighboring garrisons, against elevens 
picked from London cricket clubs and 
captained by an " old boy," and finally 
against college elevens that come down 
from Oxford and Cambridge. "While I 
was in England an eleven from Haver- 
ford College, Pennsylvania, made a tour 
of the public schools, and were every- 
where welcomed most hospitably. On 
all such occasions luncheon and tea are 
served to the visitors, and the whole day 
is passed in leisurely good-fellowship. 
134 



ETON 

More exciting than any of these 
matches is the annual game against the 
" old boys." At the beginning of the 
university long vacation fellows come 
back to visit their old haunts, and from 
these an eleven is chosen to play the 
school. The enthusiasm an old boy 
shows for his school is one of the most 
charming features of English life, and 
the way he patronizes it is truly magnifi- 
cent. The gorgeousness of his waist- 
coats and the worldly wickedness of 
the pipes he smokes (in out-of-the-way 
places, after dinner) are wonderful to 
see. You couldn't be so base as to hint 
that at the universities this magnifico 
is only a Freshmen. 

Beneath the social enjoyment and 
love of sport which enliven these home 
matches, you will perhaps, by-and-by, 
feel a deeper current setting towards 
the great final match ; for though, as I 
185 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

have said, contests between the English 
schools are ver\r rare, in this one sport 
almost every school has a natural rival. 
Rugby plays Marlborough, and Eton 
plays both Winchester and Harrow. 
Yet the spirit which rules these contests 
is very different from that in similar 
contests in America. "With us all games, 
except those for the championship, are 
regarded merely as practice, and we take 
little or no interest in them, except as 
they point towards the final games. In 
England the main object is always an 
afternoon's sport. It is only when you 
come to know the players personally 
that you realize that the multitude of 
games played have anything to do with 
beating the rival school. 

The Eton and Harrow game takes 
place at Lords, the celebrated cricket- 
held at London, where all great matches 
are held. Here the Etonians all sit on 
136 



ETON 

one side of the field, and the Harrovians 
on the other ; and though there is no 
concerted cheering, such as we have, the 
sides sometimes vie with each other in 
making a noise. A quarter to half a cen- 
tury ago these games were sometimes 
really rowdy. If you were an Etonian, 
and a red-hot Harrovian didn't quite like 
your looks, you were pretty sure to get 
your new silk hat battered about your 
ears. The warier boys would always 
walk about with their hats in their hands. 
Such rowdyism, however, was soon giv- 
en over to Eton and Harrow "cads" or 
townspeople ; and by-and-by even these 
were induced to express their loyalty in 
some other way. To-day the Harrow 
match is as orderly as the Winchester, 
and, in fact, is far more fashionable. 
Most Londoners recognize it as the end 
of the " season," and run away at once 
after it to their country-houses. 
137 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Between 1825 and 1S55 Winchester 
also met Harrow at Lords, and the 
school which won in the triple meeting 
was, of course, champion of England. 
The reasons which led to stopping these 
contests are thoroughly characteristic. 
As the Harrow-Winchester match came 
first, and the Eton -Winchester match 
last, the Wykehamist's had to stay an 
entire week in London. The effect of 
this on the morals of a boy who had al- 
ways been kept in the confinement of a 
public school was sometimes most un- 
fortunate. In spite of the protests of 
ardent cricketers, the matches were 
transferred to the home grounds. And 
though many still regret that Win- 
chester cannot meet Harrow, every- 
body cares so much more for order and 
decorum that the championship games 
at London will doubtless never be re- 
newed. 

138 



ETON 

Last year the Eton-Winchester game 
was at Winchester, and though the home 
team won, it seemed, to my unpractised 
eye at least, a rather tame affair. My 
hostess, the wife of one of the masters, 
provided our party with seats and to 
spare. When we got tired of sitting by 
the side-lines we walked about, talking 
of this batsman or that bowler, and of 
all the exciting cricket - matches since 
the year one. As there were scores of 
old boys present, there were innumera- 
ble jolly handshakings and conversa- 
tions snatched from the person you 
chanced to be walking with, in which 
two fellows, talking at the same time, 
related all that had happened since they 
were at school together. At one o'clock 
there was an interval for luncheon, and 
after a few hours more of walking and 
talking about the cricket-field, we went 
to a pavilion for tea. Then we walked 
139 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

and talked again, until suddenly the 
cricket had stopped for the da} T , and 
everybody went walking and talking to 
dress for dinner. There were three 
clays of this. 

Towards the end of the third day a 
sudden pause came over the walkers 
and talkers, which was interrupted only 
by scattered shouts of " Well bowled !" 
and the clapping of hands. The atmos- 
phere had become stifling, and, almost 
before we realized it, was full of that 
queer creepy feeling of the atmosphere 
about Exeter- Andover matches. At the 
end, everybody leaped up with a shout 
and trooped across the field. Present 
Wykehamists and old " Wykes " rushed 
in upon the eleven from all sides, and 
tossing the favorites on their shoulders 
with a shout, ran off to the cricket pa- 
vilion. Then everybody shouted; there 
was a speech or two, I believe, and all 
140 



ETON 

the gay crowd, beaming with health 
and pleasure, went walking and talking 
away again to dinner. 

I could not help laughing in my sleeve 
at the quiet and simplicity of it all. 
But on second thoughts I had to admit 
that I was wrong. If the English went 
in for all their many sports with our 
fierceness and our consuming desire to 
beat somebody, their ruddy faces would 
doubtless be as pallid and drawn as the 
cheeks of our athletes. It will scarcely 
do to console ourselves by thinking that 
the English boys are indifferent to the 
credit of the schools they represent, or 
of their friends on the athletic teams. 
" I remember well," an old boy writes 
of the match between the college and 
the rest of the school, " when the first 
inning of the redoubtable struggle 
commenced, I felt as if the hopes and 
fears of life were bounded by its issue. 
141 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

If our side won, then no possible evil 
that could befall us would be of any 
serious consequence, . . . and when one 
of our champions made the final hit . . . 
what a shout was that which burst from 
our united throats ! Shall we ever hear 
a shout like it again ?" After an Exeter- 
Andover football-match, the school that 
loses has the air of mourning its dearest 
friend. At Eton on one occasion the 
collegers did actually put on mourning. 
As eight of their men were on the Eton 
eleven, they had had reason to expect a 
victory over the Oppidans. "When they 
were beaten they dressed their bats in 
black crape and hung them on the wall, 
where they stood until an exploit of one 
of their number on the cricket-field was 
considered to have redeemed their honor. 
This happened near the beginning of 
the century. To-day I doubt if the boys 
would go to such length to express their 

142 



ETON 

chagrin ; but they feel it scarcely the 
less. After the Eton-Winchester match 
I happened to be standing near some 
Eton boys on the terrace of Windsor 
Castle watching the sun set behind the 
pinnacles of the college chapel, when a 
warder came by with a party of tourists 
and, giving a sly wink, pointed towards 
Eton. " That," he said, " is the ancient 
school of Winchester. The school-boys 
feel very happy just now because they 
have won the cricket - match against a 
place called Eton." The tourists sup- 
pressed a smile, and the Etonians moved 
off with faces that looked apologetic and 
very tired. If there is one thing more 
delightful than the quiet and the mod- 
eration of English athletic contests, it is 
the vein of earnest feeling that under- 
lies it all. 



KUG-BY 



EUGBY 

I. — EUGBY AND MODERN EDUCATION 

Rugby was founded in 1567, almost 
two hundred years later than Winches- 
ter. Its founder was not a great bish- 
op and statesman, like Wykeham, much 
less a king, like the founder of Eton, 
but plain Laurence Sheriff, one of the 
gentlemen of the Princess Elizabeth 
(afterwards Queen Bess), and a warden 
of the Grocers' Company. At first 
Rugby was a mere grammar-school for 
the education of the children of the 
country round about; and it never 
ranked high as a public school until Dr. 
Thomas Arnold, " The Doctor " of Tom 

147 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

Broiorts School- Days, became Head 
Master. To-day Rugby holds firmly 
to its middle-class traditions. There is 
not a title in the whole place. Though 
there is a large element of boys from 
Scotland, the fellows are mainly the 
sons of Midland manufacturers and of 
the doctors and lawyers of the neigh- 
boring cities. 

The chief importance of Rugby, at 
least in a book about the life school- 
boys lead in England, lies in the fact 
that it was the first of the older founda- 
tions to feel what might be called the 
humane and intelligent spirit of the 
nineteenth century. To us who live at 
the end of the century it is almost im- 
possible to imagine that big boys could 
ever have been so cruel as to make " tin 
gloves" for their fags as they did at 
Winchester, or that masters could be so 
dishonest as to live in luxury on the 
148 



RUGBY 

funds which should have been applied 
to the wants of wretched Eton colleg- 
ers ; yet such things as these might have 
happened at almost any of the English 
schools. It is not strange that gentle- 
manly manners were not to be looked 
for among the boys ; and moral and re- 
ligious education were clearly out of the 
question. When Arnold was nominated 
for the Head Mastership of Rugb} r , one 
of the men who recommended him pre- 
dicted that he would change the face of 
education throughout England. To-day 
the main glory of the school lies in the 
fact that it was the first to make a bold 
and victorious stand for the principles 
of humanity and Christianity in educa- 
tion. 

Before telling of the great work he 

did, however, I want to speak of a fact 

which people have almost always lost 

sight of in their admiration of Arnold's 

149 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

greatness. In his generation Arnold 
did not stand alone, as he seems to do to 
us now. When he spoke forth boldly 
for the spirit of Christianity in educa- 
tion he must have known that he would 
be backed up by the best moral element 
in the life about him. We shall under- 
stand this better if we turn aside from 
Rugby for a moment and take a glance 
at experiments and movements in edu- 
cation which were already on foot. 



II. — ROWLAND HILL S GOVERNMENT BY 
CONSTITUTION 

The most interesting experiment in 
education, so far as I know, as well 
as one of the earliest, was made by 
Rowland Hill, when he was still a very 
young man. " The acknowledged su- 
periority of our system of education," he 

150 



RUGBY 

writes in his journal, " leads me to think 
that the combination of talent, energy, 
and industry which exists in our family, 
directed as it is to the science of educa- 
tion, may some time or other produce 
effects which will render our name illus- 
trious in after -ages." The "system" 
was nothing more nor less than a writ- 
ten constitution under which the boys 
governed themselves. " I drew up a set 
of resolutions," he writes, " which were 
unanimously passed at a general meet- 
ing of the school." This was in 1817, 
when he was only twenty-two years old. 
In a very few years these resolutions 
expanded in the hands of the boys into 
an elaborate and minutely detailed set 
of laws which filled more than a hun- 
dred closely printed pages. Certain of 
the features of the system as described 
by Eowland Hill are very interesting. 
" Soon after midsummer (1816) I estab- 

151 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

lished a court of justice in the school. 
The judge is chosen monthly by the 
boys. The sheriff and the keeper of the 
records are chosen in the same manner. 
The attorney and solicitor-general are 
appointed by me. The judge appoints 
the inferior officers — as the clerk and 
crier of the court, the constables, etc. 
The jury consists of six boys chosen by 
ballot. . . . The sheriff keeps a book in 
which he enters all the sentences." The 
penalties imposed were " the forfeiture 
of premial marks, a certain number of 
which entitle a boy to a holiday." The 
" swell " in this constitutional school 
was a " chief magistrate," who, it is re- 
corded, saved the masters " a deal of 
trouble," and actually " put a stop to a 
practice" which before it "had never 
been found possible to check — namely, 
that of throwing stones." 

The system of dealing with fights 

152 



RUGBY 

was very ingenious. It is described by 
George Birkbeck Hill, a nephew of Row- 
land Hill, who is famous for his edition of 
BoswelVs Life of Johnson. Boys might 
fight as much as they liked if the com- 
bat took place in strict accordance with 
the new regulations. If, however, they 
fought in defiance of them, not only the 
" mighty opposites" themselves but also 
the spectators of the fray were severely 
punished. " It was the duty of the eld- 
est boy present, under a heavy penalty, 
to convey immediate information to the 
magistrate, that the parties might be 
separated." Those, however, who wished 
to fight in the manner that the law al- 
lowed, gave notice of their intention to 
the magistrate. It was then, his duty 
to inquire into the cause of the quarrel, 
and to do his best to reconcile the par- 
ties. If, after six hours had passed by, 
he had not been able to settle " the 

153 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IX ENGLAND 

swelling difference of their settled hate," 
he and his two assistants took the boys 
to a retired spot in the playground where 
they could fight it out. There was very 
little glory to be won out of such a 
combat, for " all the rest of the boys 
were confined to the school-room." One 
gravely suspects that the school -boy 
magistrates were more than likely to be- 
tray an interest in the combat not strict- 
ly magisterial. At any rate, "in later 
years one of the masters was made 
Marshal of the Lists, and not a single 
boy was allowed to be present." In the 
first three months under the new rules 
four formal fights were fought. In the 
next four years there were only two. 
No backers and bottle-holders, no fights. 
" Informal combats still went on to some 
extent, but in every instance early in- 
formation was conveyed to the magis- 
trate, who immediately separated the 
154 



RUGBY 

belligerents. The result was that fight- 
ing soon became unknown." 

Corporal punishment was done away 
with in a manner no less ingenious. In- 
stead of licking a boy, the master took 
away the rewards of merit which had 
been given for success in daily tasks. 
Thus, as Rowland Hill remarks, " the 
boys are induced to perform these tasks 
before the fines are paid, so that while 
they are thus engaged they have not the 
disagreeable feeling that they are work- 
ing for punishment/' If a boy possessed 
no rewards of merit, he was imprisoned 
in a wooden cage, at the rate of an hour 
for five credit-marks. Hill congratulates 
himself in not only avoiding corporal 
punishment but in generally making 
the boys study harder in the process. 
The system has all the plausibility and 
charm of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. 

" The whole machine of the school," 

155 



SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

writes Rowland Hill, " is now become 
so very perfect that we are able to ap- 
propriate every minute of the day to its 
respective use. ... It has the appearance 
almost of magic." In 1825 The Edin- 
burgh Review criticised the system in 
most friend!}'' terms, and no less a man 
than Thomas de Quincey spoke most 
favorably of it. It was also warmly 
praised in France, in the Revue Encyclo- 
pedique. Grote, the historian of Greece, 
inspected the school, as did our own 
President Jefferson when he was organ- 
izing the University of Virginia. In 
fact, the Hill system, known as the 
" Hazlewood system" from the house in 
which the school was finally located, 
won great reputation, and was actually 
introduced into Sweden. 

The trouble with this system, it is 
easy to see, was that it required boys to 
take grave and complicated responsibili- 
156 



RUGBY 

ties. As one of its " old boys " writes : 
"The thoughtlessness, the spring, the 
elation of childhood were taken from 
us. We were premature men. . . . The 
school was, in truth, a moral hot-bed, 
which forced us into a precocious imita- 
tion of niaturitjr. . . . Some of us had a 
great deal of the prig about us." Row- 
land Hill himself admitted in later years 
that his code of laws was far too com- 
plex, and that he greatly doubted wheth- 
er he should send his own son to a school 
conducted on such a complicated sys- 
tem. The school prospered, however, 
and continues, in a modified form, to 
this day. And though it has scarcely 
rendered Rowland Hill illustrious, the 
experiment did great credit to his mind 
and heart, and to the enthusiasm of his 
generation in matters of conduct. And 
he did live to win something like im- 
mortality in the field of education. He 
157 



SCHOOL-BO Y LIFE IN ENGLAND 

was the father of the system of penny 
postage, which, by making cheap the 
circulation of letters and papers, has 
clone wonders in enlightening the masses 
of England. For this he was made Sir 
Eowland, and his burst is now to be seen 
in "Westminster Abbey, where he lies 
buried beside England's most illustrious 
dead. 

Though the temporary success of his 
system is to be laid largely to his per- 
sonal zeal and enthusiasm, it is to be 
noticed that it was based on the funda- 
mental idea of public-school education : 
discipline was mainly in the hands of 
the older boys. It differed from the 
other public schools of that day largely 
in the fact that it attempted to do by 
means of a written constitution what 
they were attempting by means of the 
unwritten laws handed clown and de- 
veloped from the time of William of 

158 



RUGBY 

Wykeham. At the outset Eowlancl Hill 
had all the moral earnestness and pro- 
phetic fervor that the old schools lacked. 
But when later they felt the regenerat- 
ing force of the nineteenth century, they 
overtook his school little by little, silent- 
ly and irresistibly. To-day they preserve 
their old ideas, and have taken up with 
the best of his. They are famous around 
the world, and his school is unknown. 
For us Americans, who live by constitu- 
tions, and are born to the belief that the 
law can make anything right, there is 
an excellent lesson here. The traditions 
of the ancient schools of England have 
triumphed because they stand for the 
good sense and the manhood of many 
centuries, and because they are repre- 
sented to-day not by written laws but 
by men. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



III. — ARNOLD AND PUBLIC - SCHOOL TRADI- 
TION 

When Arnold came to Rugby in 183 7 
he had a great advantage over Rowland 
Hill. He was a product of the public- 
school system and of the English uni- 
versities, which Hill was not ; and where- 
as Hill had scattered established ideas 
to the winds, he possessed a strong and 
thoroughly British sense of the value 
of fixed institutions. The great antiq- 
uity and settled dignity of such schools 
as "Winchester and Eton he envied, and 
in one place he makes the suggestion 
that " when schools [have] risen from a 
very humble origin to a considerable 
place in the country, and [have] contin- 
ued so for some time, some royal gift, 
however small, should be bestowed on 
them, merely as a sort of recognition or 

160 



RUGBY 

confirmation on the part of the Crown." 
To such a man the most natural means 
to progress was not the destruction of 
all that had gone before, but a process 
of breathing new life into the old order 
of things. 

The need of new life at Bugby was 
very plain. The "houses" were mere 
boarding-houses, and the masters, who 
usually eked out their incomes by means 
of church livings, often resided at 
some vicarage or rectory in the neigh- 
borhood. Arnold, who was an old 
Wykehamist, required the masters to 
live in the houses and govern them, as 
the Winchester masters have always 
done. 

Instead of gathering the scholars to- 
gether in one college, as is done at 
Winchester and Eton, each house has 
a fair proportion of scholars. This plan 
is followed at Harrow also ; and, as I 
l 161 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

mentioned in the first of these chapters, 
the college at "Winchester is likely sooner 
or later to be broken up and scattered 
among the houses. As a result of this 
plan the Rugby " school - house "—of 
which Tom Brown was a member — is 
made up, not of a picked set of scholars, 
but of the same proportion of scholars 
and other boys, roughly speaking, as the 
houses. 

William of Wykeham's idea of dis- 
cipline Arnold sought by every means 
to establish at Rugby: I mean the idea 
that in the close community of the 
school the older boys should govern the 
younger in their daily life, and be re- 
sponsible for keeping order. " The boys, 
for nearly nine months in the year," 
Arnold writes — and one can almost im- 
agine that Wykeham is speaking — " live 
with one another in a distinct society. 
Their school-life occupies the whole of 



RUGBY 

their existence. At their studies and at 
their amusements, by day and by night, 
they are members of one and the same 
society. For this they require a gov- 
ernment. ... It is idle to say that the 
masters form, or can form, this govern- 
ment. ... In order to obtain the ad- 
vantage of home government the boys 
should be as much divided as they are 
in their respective homes. . . . A father 
with thirty sons . . . would find it no 
easy matter to govern them effectually. 
How much less can a master govern 
thirty boys, with no natural bond to 
attach them either to him or to one 
another?" For 'such reasons as these 
Arnold laid great stress on the impor- 
tance of the " sixth form," " prepostors," 
or "prefects," or whatever the oldest 
and best boys in the school may be 
called. When there are not enough of 
these to keep order in a house, as some- 
163 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

times happens, the master selects a few 
of the best scholars and athletes in the 
fifth form and gives them the power and 
responsibility of sixth -form boys. All 
readers of Tom Brown are familiar with 
the good influence which the sixth has 
on the lower boys, and with the strength 
and steadiness of character which they 
themselves learn from their duties and 
responsibilities. 

For similar reasons Arnold upheld 
the system of fagging. When so many 
bo}^s are thrown together, he argues, 
the stronger will always have power 
over the weaker. The best you can 
do is to put the power of fagging 
into the hands of those whose age, in- 
telligence, and character best fit them 
for it — that is, into the hands of the 
sixth form. When fagging is thus ra- 
tionally legalized, any excess or brutal- 
ity will at once be discovered and cor- 
164 



RUGBY 

rected. And the fags in turn profit by 
a just discipline. " The quickness, hand- 
iness, thoughtfulness, and punctuality 
which they learn . . . are no despica- 
ble part of education. Many a man 
who went from Winchester to serve in 
the Peninsula in the course of the last 
war must have found his school expe- 
rience and habits no bad preparation for 
the activity and hardships of a cam- 
paign." 

Arnold's defence of flogging some- 
how doesn't sound quite so plausible. 
In answer to an attack on the system he 
says : " I know well of what feeling this 
is the expression ; it originates in that 
proud notion of personal independence 
which is neither reasonable nor Chris- 
tian, but essentially barbarian." In an- 
other place he speaks of flogging as 
" marking [the] naturally inferior state 
of boyhood." If he had had the most 

165 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

sympathetic sense of what a boy is, I 
don't suppose he would have written 
this. And, perhaps, if he had had a finer 
notion of what is dignified in a man, he 
would not have stood out for having 
masters lay hands on their boys. Yet, 
when you come to think over what he 
says, it does not seem so entirely wrong. 
At any rate, when a boy won't stand 
round, you generally have to lick him, 
even if you are as wise as Solomon. 
Of one thing I have no doubt, and 
that is that when discipline rests firmly 
in the hands of the sixth form, flog- 
ging is far from the brutal thing sensi- 
tive people imagine. The fact that the 
flogger and the flogged are near to each 
other in age and in understanding, if 
not in sympathy, prevents it from bru- 
talizing the one or outraging the other. 
Or perhaps it would be nearer the mark 
to say that to the half-barbaric instincts 



EUGBY 

of boyhood a flogging may be not only 
the natural but the fitting punishment. 
Fights among the boys Arnold han- 
dled with characteristic moderation 
and firmness. It had been the custom 
to settle quarrels by knock-out con- 
tests somewhere out of bounds, where 
there was little or no chance of interrup- 
tion. Arnold ruled that all fights should 
take place within the close — that is, in 
the great playing-field just behind the 
school — every part of which his study 
windows overlooked. The penalty for 
breaches of this rule was the expulsion 
of all parties concerned. The fight be- 
tween Tom Brown and Slogger Will- 
iams, which took place in the close be- 
hind the old chapel, was no child's play ; 
but the appearance of the Doctor at 
least cut it off short of manslaughter. 
Once fighting was put under rules, it 
was in the plain road towards being 
167 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

suppressed altogether. To-day little 
remains of the old fighting spirit. The 
very site of Tom's famous encounter is 
now occupied by the chancel of the new 
chapel, and choir-boys sing where of old 
Rattle, in his thunder - and - lightning- 
waistcoat, wagered " two to one in half- 
crowns on the big 'un." All this, of 
course, is as it should be ; but one of the 
masters admitted to me that spite and 
backbiting are probably commoner than 
they were in the days of black eyes and 
bloody noses. If I dared, I should like 
to maintain that now and then a time 
will come, even in the life of the best of 
fellows, when boy -nature demands a 
fight ; and that to deny the fighting in- 
stinct, or to try to stamp it out, works 
no good in the growth of his character. 
In one important matter Arnold 
seems to have misjudged his boys very 
badly. It was a part of his plan for the 

168 



KUGBY 

sixth form that they should take them- 
selves very seriously as representatives 
of discipline in the school, and, when 
any serious disorder occurred, report it 
to him. This they almost always re- 
fused to do; and, in the few cases 
where they did do it, they lost caste in 
the school forever. They would lick 
offenders, as upper boys have done, I 
suppose, ever since Wykeham's day, but 
they wouldn't blab. The authority for 
this is Thomas Hughes, who was per- 
haps Arnold's warmest admirer and 
stanchest defender. His comment on it 
is that, after all, the sixth are boys and 
not masters. 

One of Judge Hughes's objects in the 
article to which I have just alluded is 
to show that Dr. Arnold is not to be 
charged with making his sixth form too 
high strung and serious for their years. 
He is particularly hard on a writer who 

169 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

declares that Arnold "combined with di- 
verse excellences the weakness of being 
a prig and the breeder of prigs, and the 
sort of person whom prigs of all suc- 
ceeding time will be lamentably prone 
to deify." This objection, it must be 
admitted, is not new : among others, 
the poet Clough has hinted at it. And 
many an old Rugbeian will admit to you 
that it took him several terms at the 
university to get into sympathy with 
the kindly race of men. That Hughes 
is right in the main, however, and the 
writer he quotes wrong, is clear in the 
fact that he is able to admit Arnold's 
failure to make the sixth peach, with- 
out discrediting his argument for the 
manliness of the great Head Master's 
way of dealing with his boys. Any read- 
er of Tom Brown will agree that, if 
Arnold bred prigs, the world would be 
better for a lot more of them. Yet the 

1T0 



RUGBY 

failure Hughes admits shows that there 
was at least a trace of weakness some- 
where, and I think an honest critic 
must grant that Arnold showed at 
times that he was not quite able to see 
that boys will be boys. 

Arnold's mastership cannot properly 
be said to have changed the face of 
public-school discipline throughout Eng- 
land. The movement towards a better 
and more Christian regulation of life 
was, as we have seen in the example of 
Eowland Hill's School, already on foot, 
and must have come even without him, 
however much more tardily. When he 
sought to change prefectorial discipline 
radically he notably failed. What he 
actually did was to transplant the sys- 
tem in which he had been brought up, 
and, by breathing into it the spirit of 
his generation, preserve what was best 
in it for future ages. 

171 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



IV. — ARNOLD AND MODERN EDUCATION 

Yet, though one has to deny him 
creative genius such as "Wykeham pos- 
sessed, his service to education was none 
the less great. Among all English 
school -masters, or, for the matter of 
that, among all school-masters of the 
world, he did most towards making his 
instruction count in developing the 
highest qualities in his pupils of the 
sixth form — their character and their 
religion. Yet even the idea of this he 
seems to have learned at "Winchester ; 
at least, there is an anecdote of his 
life there which strongly indicates this. 
When he was himself an upper boy his 
master once set him to construe a hard 
passage in Thucydides, of whom he was 
so fond that later he edited his works. 
When his master objected to the ren- 

172 



RUGBY 

dering, Arnold stood up for it stoutly, 
even obstinately. " Yery well," said 
the master, quietly, " we will have some 
one who will construe it my way." 
Some hours after school Arnold came 
to the master looking very crestfallen. 
" I have come to tell you, sir, that I 
have found out I was wrong." " Aye, 
Arnold," said the master, holding out 
his hand in forgiveness, "I knew you 
would come." Firmness and forbear- 
ance such as this were later the very 
essence of Arnold's manner with his 
boys. 

When he came to Eugby he found it 
perhaps the most immoral and rebellious 
school in England. Drunkenness and 
swearing were common, and the in- 
fluence of the worst boys was so strong 
that there was a positive public senti- 
ment in favor of vicious ways — all of 
which, we must grant, goes a long way 

173 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

towards justifying his lifelong distrust 
of boy nature. 

The process of building up the moral 
and religious life of the school was not 
easy. For instance, the boys used to 
keep guns and beagles in the backs of 
shops, and spent much of their time in 
poaching in the neighborhood. This 
sort of thing Arnold quelled only by 
telling the shopkeepers that he would 
"put their shops out of bounds" — that 
is, forbid the boys to go into them to 
buy things — if they kept on helping 
the boys to go poaching. 

The horsy cliques caused Arnold more 
trouble. Rugby is in a first-rate hunt- 
ing country, so that the temptation was 
very great to mount a nag and go scur- 
rying off over ditches and hedges. On 
one occasion a boy who fancied him- 
self as a steeple-chaser bragged that he 
could give any fellow in the school the 

174 



RUGBY 

pick of all the horses in Rugby town 
and beat him. A sixth-form boy named 
Corbett accepted the challenge, select- 
ing as a mount the best fencer he could 
find. The challenger picked the fastest 
horse in town. In the race the fast 
horse refused several of the fences, so 
that Corbett won, amid great enthusi- 
asm. After the race the challenger 
whined so much about the superiority 
of Corbett's horse as a fencer that Cor- 
bett challenged him to swap horses and 
try another race. This time Corbett, 
who seems to have been the best kind 
of a sportsman, was so careful in taking 
the fences that he fell behind, yet he 
did not miss a single one of them. On 
the home-stretch he gave his speedy ani- 
mal the spurs, and, as he had planned, 
spurted in ahead, amid wild enthusiasm 
from his friends. Of all this Arnold 
took no notice, which so elated the 
175 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

boys that they got up a grand steeple- 
chase, for which seven horses entered. 
At this juncture Arnold sent for Corbett 
and told him that he had winked at the 
first two races only because if he had 
taken any notice of them he should have 
had to expel both boys. He added that 
if the steeple-chase came off he would 
expel every boy who rode or was pres- 
ent at it. There was no steeple-chase. 
Soon after, however, a great national 
steeple-chase taking place at Dunchurch, 
a neighboring town, Arnold " put the 
course in bounds" for the day. The 
whole school went to see it, and every 
sensible and manly boy must have been 
won over to his master's side. Beside 
the sturd}^ common -sense that alone 
could have prompted such a course, the 
"system" of the Hill school is absurd 
enough, and even Wykeham's glory 
seems less. 

176 



RUGBY 

Of the strength of Arnold's religious 
views, and the prominence he gave in 
his instruction to the Christian ideas, it 
is almost impossible to give an adequate 
conception. Again and again he lays 
stress on the necessity of Christianity 
to education. The masters he prefers 
are to be Christian gentlemen ; their 
scholarship is a matter of minor impor- 
tance. And the boys who pass through 
the school are to become men of strong 
character and deep religious feeling; 
it matters little how clever they be- 
come. More than this, his whole ideal 
of education is, in effect, that it shall fill 
the land with men who shall put law 
and government on a basis of Christian- 
ity. The grandeur of this conception, 
it seems to me, has not yet been justly 
valued. Even his great biographer, Dean 
Stanley, seems scarcely to have viewed 
it in perspective. Yet it is possible that 

m 177 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

we are able to see it the more clearly 
because we are so far removed from its 
attainment, and because we see that the 
spread of sectarian feeling, to say noth- 
ing of the breaking clown of old con- 
ceptions, are rendering it less and less 
possible. And with all this comes the 
doubt whether Arnold's plan was ever 
really adapted to the estate of boyhood. 
His failing to do away with the boyish 
code of morals which forbids peaching 
in the sixth form suggests that the sixth 
form is scarcely capable of being made 
the lever to overturn the existing codes 
in private and public life. 

Even here, in his dearest and highest 
aims, Arnold's personal influence was 
more important than the new idea he 
sought to introduce. " I am sure,'' writes 
a pupil — and his case is thoroughly typ- 
ical — " that I do not exaggerate my 
feelings when I say that I felt a love 

178 



RUGBY 

and reverence for him as one of quite 
awful greatness and goodness, for whom 
I well remember that I used to think 
that I would gladly lay down my 
life. ... I used to believe that I had a 
work to do for him in the school, and I 
did, for his sake, labor to raise the tone 
of the set I lived in, particular^ as re- 
garded himself." It is pleasant to find 
it recorded that Arnold once said of 
such a boy as this, " If he should turn 
out ill I think it would break my heart." 
It is still pleasanter to know that such 
boys did not turn out ill. As under- 
graduates at the universities, and after- 
wards as masters at public schools, they 
lived by the ideals they had learned at 
Rugby ; and though Arnold did not 
change the face of education in any liter- 
al sense, the change that was wrought 
by the generation for which he stood 
was none the less great for that. His 

179 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

pupils, and the pupils of his pupils, have 
carried his personal influence through- 
out England. At Bugby, as is natural, 
the influence of his teaching has always 
been strong, and the school has been 
more uniformly fortunate in its masters, 
perhaps, than any other. To-day its 
moral and religious tone is notably 
strong-. 



V. THE SCHOOL-HOUSE AND THE CLOSE 

All the dearest associations at Rugby 
have to do with the fight that was fought 
in Arnold's time, and the most sacred 
landmarks and customs are those which 
are mentioned in Tom Brown. As you 
are shown through the school-house, 
your guide points out the " double 
study" — fully five feet by six — which 
is said to have been occupied by Tom 
and Arthur. The boys who use it now, 
180 



RUGBY 

I am certain, never doubt that an actual 
Tom Brown once lived in it. In the 
corridor, to be sure, the top of the old 
hall - table, with t. hughes carved bold- 
ly upon it in capitals, is hung rever- 
ently upon the wall; but the explana- 
tion of this is precisely that which a 
school-boy once gave to the question of 
the authorship of Homer. If Tom 
Browrts School- Days was not about' 
Tom Brown, it was about another boy 
of the same name. 

In one of the dormitories you will find 
the oak table on top of which new boys 
were — and still are — made to sing. The 
rule is that they must stand with their 
legs as wide astraddle as possible, and 
hold a lighted candle in each hand. 
Your guide will show you the tin candle- 
guards or " parishes " in which the can- 
dles were held. On the table beside 
the boy is always placed a jug of 
181 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

drink, composed of beer, salt, mustard, 
soap, and other savory ingredients, a 
swallow of which the new boy is made 
to gulp down if he fails to sing a song. 
About the walls of the room are ranged 
eleven little oak cots, beside one of 
which Arthur most certainly knelt to 
pray on his first night in school. Or if 
you insist that Arthur never lived, why, 
then, you remember that every fellow 
has knelt down, or wished he dared to, 
on his first night of homesickness in a 
strange, rough place. 

The school-house dining-hall stands 
almost exactly as it stood in Tom 
Brown's days. There are tables all 
around the sides, and a table in the 
middle. The small boys sit about the 
side tables, and, as the } 7 ears go by, 
move gradually around the room, until 
at last they are admitted to the middle 
table. To sit here means much more 

182 



RUGBY 

than merely being in the sixth form. 
At the side of the hall is the fireplace 
where Flashman roasted Tom for refus- 
ing to sell the lottery ticket on Harka- 
way; and the very benches stand beside 
it upon which the bully's head struck, 
a few clays later, when Tom and East 
finally got the better of him. From the 
dining-room there are two doors leading 
into the quad, one through a long and 
difficult passage, and the other opening 
directly upon it. The little boys who 
sit at the side tables have to go out 
through the long passage : only the big 
boys at the middle table can go out 
directly. For a little boy to go out 
through the big boys' door would be 
unheard-of arrogance. This, Eugbeians 
think, is an excellent custom, both be- 
cause it existed in Tom Brown's time, 
and because it teaches boys their places. 
When I told my guide that it remind- 
183 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

ed me of the farmer who had a big hole 
in his barn door for his cat, and a little 
hole for his kitten, I think he thought 
me irreverent. 

Across the court, outside the hall, are 
the turret-stairs leading up to the school- 
rooms where Arnold met his sixth form. 
Many a man who is now old and gray 
remembers these rooms as the place 
where he learned more about obedience 
and more about ruling vigorously and 
justly than he might ever have known 
except for his Head Master at Rugby. 
The walls of the rooms are covered with 
old table-tops, upon which are carved 
the names of these ancient Rugbeians. 
The tables now in use are untouched. 
If a boy carves so much as his initials, 
he has to have the wood planed and 
polished, or pay the price of a new table. 
Fame comes harder nowadays. 

We walk out at last into the ample 
184 



KUGBY 

close. The three trees which used, to 
stand within the football-field are all 
gone ; and many another well-known 
tree was blown over in a recent wind- 
storm. Still, there are plenty left for 
shade, and though one always grudges 
an old and beautiful landmark, perhaps 
the football and cricket-fields are the 
better for the lack of them. To an 
American traveller the Rugby close will 
always be of interest as the birthplace 
and original home of that form of foot- 
ball which gave rise to our own familiar 
game ; but if he has read Tom Brown 
in his boyhood, he will think of it rather 
as the place where Tom made his entry 
to Rugby life in the big-sicle football 
game, and where, with Arthur on his 
eleven, he played his final game of 
cricket. About the close the pleasantest 
memories of the school hover ; and of all 
public schools Rugby is the one which 

185 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

appeals most strongly to the democratic 
instincts of an American. Here boys 
are equal not only by custom, as at Eton, 
but by native instinct ; and here many 
generations have learned to value them- 
selves, in Arnold's phrase, as gentlemen 
and Christians. 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

I. THE GEEAT ENGLISH SCHOOLS 

If space permitted, it would be pleas- 
ant to speak at length of Harrow : cer- 
tainly, as the schools rank to-day, it is 
by no means inferior to Kugby. And 
it would be easy to extend the list of 
schools much further. When the com- 
mission was appointed a score of years 
ago to examine into the leading schools, 
nine were selected as being in the first 
rank, and to-day this number would 
scarcely include all. Charterhouse and 
Westminster are famous for their antiq- 
uity and for the amusing customs that 
still exist among the boys ; and Marl- 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN EXGLAXD 

borough, Haileybury, Clifton, Repton, 
and many others deserve notice. Yet, 
in the main, the life in all these schools 
is the same. The master in each house 
makes his influence felt by kindness and 
the birch ; the sixth form keeps order 
in the daily life, chiefly by means of 
the rod ; and everybody goes in for 
out-of-door sports. 



II. — CERTAIN CHARGES AGAINST THE 
SCHOOLS 

Of the value of the public-school sys- 
tem as it exists to-day, it is not easy to 
speak with confidence. Like all insti- 
tutions that have their roots deep in 
human life — marriage and fatherhood, 
for instance — it raises questions which 
have always been raised, and which have 
never been answered. Is a master justi- 

190 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

fied in birching a boy who does not 
learn his lessons? Solomon thought 
yes, and Arnold thought so, too. In 
the modern schools the masters, who 
are always subject to a running fire of 
criticism from anxious parents, and even 
from the public press, answer that in 
proportion as teachers understand their 
business it becomes less necessary to 
give bodily punishment, but that there 
will probably never come a time when 
it can be wholly discarded. 

Again, is it right that the sixth form 
should punish disorderly subordinates 
without bringing their case before the 
master % The wise prefect would doubt- 
less admit that in proportion as the 
sixth form knows its business it be- 
comes less necessary to administer flog- 
gings. Yet this is not the whole truth. 
For a boy properly authorized to give 
bodily punishment to another boy is 
191 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

perhaps more in character than for a 
master to do it ; at least, the resort to 
physical force is the natural, and per- 
haps the wholesome, expression of boy 
nature. As a means of discipline it is 
certainly better than flogging by a mas- 
ter. When the best big boys decide 
that a youngster ought to be flogged, 
and flog him, there is something about 
it all that brings disgrace and repent- 
ance. When a master does the same, 
the culprit becomes in a way a hero. 
The other fellows are apt to ask him 
sympathetically to take down his trou- 
sers and let them see how badly it hurt. 
Yet as a matter of fact sixth -form 
floggings, instead of increasing, are be- 
coming less frequent and severe. They 
are now generally inflicted with a light 
cane. At Rugby what sometimes is 
called a " sixth licking " is resorted to. 
The members of the sixth form living 

192 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

in the house where the fault was com- 
mitted, consult, take notes, and, if the 
case justifies, chastise the culprit in 
turn. Of late years even this judicial 
and impartial form of flogging has been 
dying out. The old boys, as far as I was 
able to judge, sincerety regret this. It 
would be pleasant to think that flog- 
ging is dying out because the influence 
of the sixth has become so strong and 
wholesome ; but there is reason, I fear, 
for doubting whether the humane spirit 
of our generation is not being pushed to 
the verge of sentimentality. 

Cases are constantly occurring in 
which the influence of the sixth is ob- 
viously at fault ; and in these the result is 
as bad as when a husband is a brute or 
a father a tyrant. Not long ago a boy 
committed suicide by diving into the 
cow-catcher of a train, and left a letter 
that plainly charged three of his school- 

n 193 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

mates with making his life unbearable. 
The coroner said that he must have been 
insane ; but many people gravely doubted 
this. The newspapers were filled with 
letters. On the one hand, anxious par- 
ents cried down the whole public-school 
system, and, on the other, burly old boys 
maintained that it is a good thing to be 
ballyragged now and then, or to have 
your bare calves toasted before a fire. 
One question was raised, however, which 
touches the vital spot of the system — 
namely, whether the sixth form is wise 
in peaching to the master. The head 
of the school said that if the boy — who, 
as it happened, was a member of the 
sixth form — had only reported his tor- 
mentors, all might have gone well. In 
the same letter, however, he argued that 
the lad must have been insane, or he 
would not have so far forgotten the 
school-boy's code of honor as to charge 
194 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

three comrades with cruelty in such a 
pointed fashion ; and the next day an- 
other correspondent pointed out that a 
boy would scarcely have gained much 
by reporting his case to a master who 
held such an opinion. Then other cor- 
respondents asked why a boy should be 
prevented by public opinion from peach- 
ing on the other fellows, whereas in a 
man it is not only allowable to maintain 
one's rights before the proper authorities, 
but a sacred duty. The answer to this 
was that there are certain cases even in 
a man's life which so nearly concern 
one's self or one's friends that no one 
could fail to lose caste by dragging 
them before a magistrate ; and that 
even if there were not, the plain fact 
remains that no community of boys, 
however enlightened, can be made to 
tolerate peaching or " sneaking." The 
upshot of the whole matter, so far as 

195 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

I could make out, was that in a school 
where a member of the sixth could be 
so harassed, discipline must have been 
at a very low ebb ; and I should very 
much like to know how much of this 
was due to the gradual decrease of flog- 
ging. As long as the master is cut off 
from his boys by such a barrier as the 
prejudice against peaching, those who 
are clothed in his authority should have 
full use of the means which is best 
adapted in their hands to the enforce- 
ment of law and order. The only other 
course is to abolish the entire public- 
school system. 

The prominence of athletics has also 
been a subject for severe criticism. Boys 
are compelled to go in regularly for 
some sport or other, though there is so 
little resistance on their part that it has 
not occurred to me until now to speak 
of this. At Eton every boy has to de- 
196 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

cide whether he shall row and be a 
" wet bob," or go into the many land 
sports and be a " dry bob." If a wet 
bob shirks the river, he very soon hears 
from the older boys. One youngster, 
last year, who had a "lock-up," or pri- 
vate boat, and was found never to use 
it, was regularly " pop-caned." At Rug- 
by I heard a sad story of a small boy 
who was found in a football scrimmage 
eating chocolate-creams. The big boys 
promptly took him out on the side-lines 
and swished him. When public opinion 
fails, the masters back it up, and nothing 
but an iron-clad doctor's certificate will 
save a boy. The people who are op- 
posed to the prominence given to sports 
repeat what Aristotle said about the se- 
vere training which the Spartans under- 
went — that it made them " brutal of 
soul." Such people would have boys 
more like Athenians. This opinion, I 
197 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

must say, sounds very learned, and one 
would be forced to give it all deference 
except for one thing — that is, that boys 
are neither Spartans nor Athenians, but 
boys. The idea that they should be 
made Athenians is as lofty as Arnold's 
idea that they should be educated to put 
business and politics on an ideally Chris- 
tian basis ; but it seems to me to be also 
as lacking in a knowledge of boy nature. 
Moreover, it is not so clear that that 
which, pursued for a lifetime, makes 
one brutal of soul will have the same 
effect in boyhood. In other words, 
the prevalence of the athletic spirit 
seems to me to be as plain a symptom 
of the aptness of the English school life 
to the instincts of boyhood as the pre- 
fectorial system. It may be true that 
nowadays school-boys have less interest 
in the serious things of this world and 
the next than they had when influences 
198 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

such as Arnold's were more strongly 
felt ; at the universities they say that 
this is so. Yet no one denies that the 
strife of the athletic field stirs the vigor 
in them, and that as much of hero-wor- 
ship as is good for a boy is given to the 
strongest and best athletes of the school. 
It is at least some recommendation that 
the athletic spirit does not depend on 
the personal influence of any one mas- 
ter, but springs eternal in the youthful 
breast. 



in. THE RESPECT DUE TO BOYHOOD 

The main question at issue in all these 
charges against the schools is whether 
it is fitting to give so much sway to the 
native instincts of boyhood. This is a 
question that Arnold was constantly pon- 
dering. We have already seen that he 
bluntly declares boyhood to be an infe- 
199 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

rior state. In another place he says that 
it is unquestionably an extremely dan- 
gerous time, in that temptation is great 
and the strength of character to resist it 
exceedingly small. Again, having asked 
the question whether the change from 
boyhood to manhood can be hastened, 
and how far it ought to be hastened, he 
replies that, as for the growth of a boy's 
character, love of unselfishness, and fear 
of God, his development not only can be 
hastened, but should be hastened. Such 
opinions as these almost any man of 
Puritan instincts would agree with ; and 
for any one to deny Arnold's mature 
judgment, on matters in which he was 
so well fitted to speak, would be rash. 
Yet since his day many experiments 
have been made in bringing up boys, 
and many thoughtful men have written 
on the subject. To-day we are more 
likely to respect the state of boyhood 
200 



THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF TO-DAY 

and sympathize with it, to regard it 
as necessary and beautiful rather than 
dangerous, and to believe that the more 
fully a boy learns to be a boy the more 
thoroughly he will be a man when the 
time comes. In its way, boyhood is as 
little to be avoided as old age. Both 
were ordained by the power that no one 
has ever understood; they are equally 
necessary for the fulness of life, and 
equally beautiful. 

If William of Wykeham were to find 
such ideas as these attributed to him, I 
doubt if he would recognize them. Yet 
the fact remains that he provided that 
his boys should be boys and govern 
each other, and that for five centuries 
the men who succeeded him found no 
better plan of government. The pub- 
lic schools are built up upon the solid 
manhood of fifteen generations, and dur- 
ing all of that time they have relied for 

201 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

discipline, in the main, on the native im- 
pulses of boy nature. The life boys lead, 
meanwhile, has little by little been bet- 
tered as the generations have become 
more civilized. If these facts prove any- 
thing, they prove that the public-school 
system has its source deep in the best 
instincts of the English people. Beyond 
this no praise is possible. 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
SCHOOLS 



ENGLISH AND AMEKICAN 
SCHOOLS 

I. — AMERICAN BOYS IN ENGLAND 

The charm of the life in the English 
schools, and their splendid efficiency in 
developing mental and moral character, 
of which, I fear, I have given only a far- 
away impression, have led not a few 
parents in America to send their sons 
to them to be educated. And among 
the Americans whom business or the pur- 
suit of happiness have taken to Europe 
for good, many more have done the 
same. In the case of those who have 
said good - b}^e to America forever, no 
criticism is possible. Their children are 
205 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

in a way to become as un-American as 
possible ; and in a few generations they 
may even be English, though nothing 
could be more un-English to start with 
than a lack of sympathy and loyalty for 
one's native land. Sometimes, however, 
American boys go to Winchester or 
Eton to prepare for Yale or Harvard ; 
and in other cases they go from the 
schools to Cambridge or Oxford as a 
preparation for American life. Nothing, 
to my mind, could be more fatal to a 
boy's happiness, or even to his best 
education. It is true that as schools, 
the English are better than our own — 
they do more good to English boys than 
ours do to American. But just here lies 
the clanger. An Eton boy coming to 
Harvard, or an Oxford man entering 
upon the practice of a profession in 
America, may in many respects be the 
superior of the people with whom his 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

happiness is to be linked. He is perhaps 
better educated, he is likely to have 
more knowledge of the best the world 
has to offer, his manners are better. If 
he is to enter into his new life with all 
his heart and soul — and if he is not to do 
so he had best not enter at all — he will 
be tempted to unlearn much that he has 
learned, to abide by standards of which 
he cannot wholly approve. If he resists 
this temptation — as he will do, if he has 
the right backbone — he must have infi- 
nite tact and good sense to avoid making 
himself disliked. For a boy or a young 
man educated abroad to ignore the worst 
he finds at home and take up with the 
best may be possible ; but I think that 
most thoughtful parents will agree that 
they have little right to expect such a 
triumph of a son. In some cases, boys 
have been snubbed in England for being 
Americans, and snubbed again when 
207 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

they got back for being too English. 
The lesson to be learned from the Eng- 
lish schools is not to be learned by send- 
ing our boys to them, but by studying 
them as institutions. As a people, we 
are apt both to brag about our country 
and to despise it, which at bottom are, 
of course, the same weaknesses. The 
lesson we should read in the English 
schools is that the really happy nation 
slowly develops its own institutions to 
fit its best needs, and then quietly abides 
by them. 

Such considerations must have been 
clear to parents who have sent sons 
abroad. But there is one further consid- 
eration. Throughout the public schools 
a vice is prevalent which is so shocking 
that it is never mentioned except among 
those most familiar with the life the 
boys lead. And though the masters 
have tried, and keep trying, to suppress 

208 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

it by every means in their power, there 
is as yet no real public sentiment against 
it. An American boy of necessity be- 
comes accustomed to a kind of deprav- 
ity of which at home he would proba- 
bly never hear. To mention this is the 
duty of any one who has written with 
such high admiration of the schools as I 
have tried to express. Yet because of 
it it would be unjust to condemn the 
schools as a whole. The English people, 
in all times and in all its institutions, 
has had a most wonderful genius for 
rising above its vices, and being a strong 
power on the side of the good in spite 
of them. When we have had a Wyke- 
ham or an Arnold in America, which, I 
fear, will not be soon, we shall be able 
to afford to despise the schools which 
the centuries have built up in England. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 



II. ENGLISH SCHOOLS IN AMERICA 

A number of schools in America have 
shown a disposition of late years to 
adapt English institutions to our needs. 
Of these, St. Paul's is, perhaps, the 
most widely known as having an Eng- 
lish bias. In spite, however, of the 
great reputation, and no less great 
disrepute, it has incurred on this ac- 
count, I cannot find that it can with 
justice be called English. The main 
features of the public schools, as we 
have found, are, first, that the boys live 
in separate houses of a score or two 
each, under separate masters ; and, sec- 
ondly, that under the masters the older 
boys govern the younger, and are ac- 
countable for keeping order. Neither 
of these features is fully developed at 
St. Paul's. It is true that the boys are 

210 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

watched, over with much of the English 
severity, and have as little liberty as 
their English cousins ; but the reputa- 
tion of being English, as far as I can 
find, comes not from this, but from the 
fact that they are not allowed to play 
baseball and are encouraged to play 
cricket. The reason for this is that, 
some dozen years ago, they got so ex- 
cited over baseball that the Head Mas- 
ter thought best to forbid the game. 
Since they have been playing cricket 
it is not recorded that they have ever 
become excited. 

At Lawrenceville the boys are di- 
vided among houses of the true English 
stamp, and the plan works well in the 
main. Coupled with the house system 
is a strictness of guarding the boys no 
less great than at St. Paul's. In the 
English schools, such strictness is thor- 
oughly in character ; for both at home, 
211 



SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

before boys go to school, and at the uni- 
versities afterwards, they are closely 
watched over. At both St. Paul's and 
Lawrenceville, however, the strictness 
has had one great drawback — when 
the boys go to college they are not 
always prepared to profit by the lib- 
erty of conduct they are allowed there 
in America. When I was an under- 
graduate, we used to notice that the 
fellows from the strictest schools were 
the first to go to the bad. At Law- 
renceville the Head Master has sought 
to remedy this difficulty by having the 
boys live together during the last year 
at school in a house where they are 
given something like the freedom they 
are so soon to enjoy. The plan is no 
doubt excellent ; but by taking the old- 
est and highest boys out of the houses, 
all chance is destroyed of anything like 
sixth-form, or prefectorial government. 
212 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

The only school in America, I am told, 
where anything like sixth-form govern- 
ment exists is Groton, where most of 
the other English ideas are lacking. 
Clearly, we have not yet adopted the 
public - school system, and have suc- 
ceeded only imperfectly in adapting it. 
While these experiments have been 
going on in the newer schools, the older 
ones, Exeter and Andover, have devel- 
oped along their own lines. They al- 
low the boys far greater liberty, and 
take much less care of their manners 
and morals. The difference between 
those schools and the English schools 
is, roughly speaking, the same as be- 
tween an American home and an 
English home, and between Harvard 
and Oxford. As I have pointed out, 
they are like the Winchester and the 
Eton of the seventeenth century. And 
the likeness is not limited to the great 

213 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

— perhaps too great — freedom allowed. 
The boys live in boarding-houses un- 
der " dames," whose position is much 
that of the dames of the eighteenth 
century at Eton. Already there has 
been some discussion of a plan for put- 
ting these houses under the control of 
masters, much as was done at Eton 
many decades ago. It will be inter- 
esting to watch how these, the most 
American of all our schools, develop 
their institutions. 



III. — ENGLISH IDEAS IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

The fact that our newer schools are 
tending to adopt English ideas, while 
the older ones are developing in the 
English fashion of their own accord, 
suggests an inquiry as to how far it is 
possible to model our preparatory 
214 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

schools after the great public schools. 
At the outset we are met with a very 
grave obstacle. The entire conception 
of breeding and education is different 
in the two countries. Almost from the 
cradle our children are allowed and 
even encouraged to shift for themselves. 
In England the children of the upper 
classes are apt to divide their time be- 
tween sequestered country estates and 
the schools, in both of which they are 
watched over pretty much all day 
long. Even at the universities they 
are forbidden to go to London without 
leave — though they often break bounds 
— and are actually prevented, except in 
rare instances, from passing a night 
away from their rooms. Obviously the 
institutions adapted to such a regime 
must in some degree be impossible to us. 
As for the prefectorial system, where 
liberty is so great, it would be impossible 

215 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

to establish it on a firm basis. Boys 
Avho have never really learned to obey 
would find it hard to govern wisely 
and with a strong hand, even if they 
wished to do so. And it is to be 
feared that they would prove as loath 
to take care of their juniors as they 
had been to be taken care of. Added 
to this is the objection that, in the 
absence of the "houses'' of the public 
schools, our social life has already been 
largely organized on the basis of ex- 
clusive clubs, a thing unheard of in Eng- 
land outside of Eton. The result is 
that we should not have at the outset 
the wholesome democracy of English 
school life. The ablest and most manly 
of prefects, I take it, would not always 
be able to forget the artificial distinc- 
tions which school societies produce. 

Against the house system, however, 
no such objection can be found. It may 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

not be possible, to be sure, to make the 
house as close a community as in Eng- 
land — the freedom granted in our 
schools is too great ; but it could not 
fail to be an improvement on the helter- 
skelter life so many boys lead. And 
though the clubs and societies would in 
the later years separate a number of fel- 
lows from their houses, those who were 
left out of the societies, instead of being 
scattered outsiders as they are now, 
would have a definite and well organ- 
ized social life. And in the long-run a 
well-organized house system would take 
away the glamour from the societies, 
and perhaps in the end make it possi- 
ble to do away with them altogether, 
as a number of the schools are already 
trying to do. And if the houses were 
on a strong and permanent footing, it 
would be much easier to introduce the 
prefectorial system. 
217 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

The benefits of the house system 
would nowhere be more evident than in 
the status of athletics. One of the first 
results of a well-ordered life in small 
communities is the birth of rivalries 
of the kind that lend utmost zest to 
sports. Each house would be certain to 
have its own nine, its eleven, and, where 
possible, its crew. It is true that our 
schools have been justly charged with 
overdoing athletics ; but the fault lies 
not in the number of our contests, but 
in an exaggeration of the spirit of par- 
tisanship — the disposition to prize the 
victory more highly than the strife. In 
the English schools the cultivation of 
sport is far more general than with us, 
and, on the whole, far more enthusi- 
astic ; yet, instead of developing a spirit 
of excess, the schools are the source of 
the honorable and generous spirit in 
sports which we are learning to admire 

218 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

in our English cousins. The secret of 
this lies in the fact that whereas we have 
a few games each season the results of 
which are of excessive importance, the 
house system gives scope for a multitude 
of interesting matches. Give us twenty 
contests for every one of to-day, and the 
tendency to exaggerate the importance 
of any of them, even the greatest, will 
subside. The bo} 7 s who now spend their 
afternoons encouraging and applauding 
the practice of the school team will have 
games of their own to go into ; and when 
the grandstand has been done away with 
the greatest temptation to excess is re- 
moved. Moreover, when every boy is 
a sportsman in fact as well as in sym- 
pathy, the prevailing sentiment will be 
the wholesome love of a well-fought con- 
test. When such a time comes, Exeter 
and Andover will have no reason to sus j 
pect each other of lying and cheating. 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

And from that it will follow that Har- 
vard and Yale will not have to sulk a 
year or two in order to regain their re- 
spect for each other. 



IV. THE IMPORTANCE OF SECONDARY EDU- 
CATION 

The obstacle in the way of establish- 
ing the house system is largely the lack 
of the funds necessary to the mainte- 
nance of so many houses and masters. 
Dozens of universities have been en- 
dowed, and scores of colleges ; but very 
few donors have appreciated the needs 
of our schools. 

The most hopeful sign of the times in 
this particular has come from a school in 
which a movement was on foot towards 
becoming a college. The principal ob- 
jected that, though the school offered 
220 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

the equivalent of two years of a college 
course, he had no wish to alter its char- 
acter. Only an endowment of the most 
liberal kind, he declared — one sufficient 
for a thoroughly reputable college — 
would justify a change. He thought 
it worthier to be a first-rate school 
than a second-rate college. 

The common-sense of this is obvious, 
once it is honestly stated ; but it is none 
the less true that the declaration is al- 
most unique in the annals of American 
education. In the past, the ruling spirit 
among our educators has been one of 
crude pretence. With boundless trust 
in our future, men leaving bequests in- 
adequate to found a reputable school 
have founded colleges. The result of 
this has been that the cause of second- 
ary education has suffered in the ex- 
treme. Every year our most advanced 
institutions of learning have declared 

221 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

that men come to them radically un- 
prepared to profit by a university edu- 
cation. The freshman and sophomore 
years have in consequence to be largely 
given over to the vexatious and waste- 
ful endeavor to teach men what they 
should have learned at school. Of this 
state of things the recurrent complaint 
that undergraduates cannot speak and 
write the language to which they were 
born is a single symptom. 

And we have here only the beginning 
of the evil. The assumption that sec- 
ondary education is of secondary im- 
portance is radically false. For every 
one boy who can afford to study until 
he is twenty-two, scores are forced to 
enter active life at eighteen, or even 
earlier. And, waiving the question of ex- 
pense, it is more than doubtful whether 
any considerable proportion of the young 
men of a nation are fitted by nature to 
222 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

profit either in mind or in character by 
a four years' residence even at a first- 
rate college. The secondary schools have 
in their charge, or should have, the edu- 
cation of the mass of men who are to 
make American laws and to administer 
them. To despise the secondary schools, 
or in any way to make them of second- 
ary importance, is to neglect the vital 
interests of the nation. 

Our colleges in turn have not escaped 
the fallacy here involved. The moment 
they have the slightest claim as institu- 
tions of learning, they grasp at the name 
of university. In England there are 
scores of public schools, and only three 
universities of note. In the single State 
of Ohio, as an ingenious statistician has 
calculated, there are more foundations 
claiming high rank as institutions of 
learning than in all of Europe. The 
absurdity of this is manifest ; but some 
223 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

of even the older and more respectable 
colleges have of late succumbed to the 
ambition to pull themselves up by the 
boot-straps. To make this clear we have 
only to consider the distinction which 
accepted usage makes in America be- 
tween the college and the university. 
The college aims chiefly to provide an 
efficient four years' course of study, sup- 
plementary to the course pursued in the 
preparatory schools. Of necessity, the 
instruction offered is general, and is in- 
compatible with serious special research 
or professional training. Its aim is nor- 
mally to educate as men and as citizens 
such boys from the preparatory schools 
as can afford higher education and are 
capable of profiting by it. The uni- 
versity, on the other hand, aims to carry 
its students for ward into the field of pure 
scholarship, which has only indirectly to 
do with character and citizenship ; and 
224 



ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOOLS 

especially it aims to afford thorough 
training in the professions, such as teach- 
ing, law, medicine, and theology. Yet 
that the position of the university is of 
necessity more dignified or otherwise 
desirable than that of the college is no 
more obvious than that the college is 
more important than the secondary 
school. Within the past year, however, 
one of our oldest colleges, and the one 
in which the college ideal has hitherto 
been conserved in its utmost strength 
and purity, has attempted this meta- 
morphosis into a university. As a mat- 
ter of fact, its facilities for special re- 
search are meagre, and its endowment 
not large. It has no law school. The 
study of medicine is precluded, both by 
the absence of hospitals and by the ex- 
istence of a State law against dissect- 
ing the human body. Yet to-day it has 
ceased to be the foremost of American 
p 225 



SCHOOL-BOY LIFE IN ENGLAND 

colleges, and has become one of the least 
of American universities. This instance 
is typical, and to all such ambitious proj- 
ects we humbly recommend the exam- 
ple of the school principal, cited above, 
and of the English conception of educa- 
tion. If we were to add anything, it 
w r ould be that the function of the college 
is of greater importance to the nation 
than that of the university, and that the 
function of the secondary school is more 
vital than that of either. 



FOOTBALL FACTS AND FIGUEES 

Compiled by Walter Camp. Post 8vo, Or- 
namental Paper Covers, 75 cents. 

STATISTICS COLLECTED BY 

The Hon. James W. Alexander, of the Equi- 
table Life Assurance Company. 
The Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of the Yale Cor- 
poration. 
The Hon. Henry E. Howland, of the New 

York Bar. 
W alter Camp. 

The Rev. Endicott Peabody, of Groton School. 
Robert Bacon, of the Harvard Board of Over- 
seers. 

This volume embodies the results of careful and 
painstaking inquiries as to the effects, physical and 
otherwise, of football upon those taking part in the 
game. Information and statistics have been gathered 
from those best qualified to supply them — expert and 
celebrated players, members of the faculties of our 
colleges, etc. — and the work throws a flood of light 
upon a much-discussed subject. 



NEW YORK AND LONDON: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

4®= The above work is for sale by all booksellers, or will be 
mailed by the publishers, postage prepaid, on receipt of the price. 



AMERICAN FOOTBALL 



By Walter Camp. With Thirty-one Portraits. 

16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25. 

A volume which will appeal directly to the players 
of America's robust game, as well as to the followers 
of the sport. . . . There are few men so thoroughly 
conversant with the subject as Mr. Camp. — N. Y. 
Tribune. 

The game is described comprehensively and with 
admirable clearness. — N.Y. Sun. 

Easily the first treatise on that now popular game. 
It is not only eminently readable, even to the tyro, 
but it contains suggestions based on such profound 
experience in the science of football that no captain 
or coach of any first-rate team can afford to miss the 
consideration of them. — JV. Y. Evening Post. 

Mr. Camp probably knows football more thoroughly 
than any other man in this country, and he is emi- 
nently well qualified to speak of the capabilities of 
each place on an eleven. To the captains of the 
larger teams what he has to say will of course prove 
hardly new ; but to the players of lesser experience 
and to the ordinary on-lookers Mr. Camp's descrip- 
tion of the positions will give a most accurate and 
valuable idea of how real football should be played. 
— Harvard Crimson. 

It would be hard to find a writer more thoroughly 
conversant with his subject than Mr. Camp. The 
technique of the game is carefully criticised and ex- 
plained, and there are many valuable hints for cap- 
tains and players, each position being treated in de- 
tail. — Princetonian. 



NEW YORK AND LONDON: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

^~ Tin' above work is for sale by all booksellers, or will be 
sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, on receipt of the price. 



ON SNOW-SHOES TO THE BARREN 
GROUNDS. Twenty -eight Hundred 
Miles after Musk-Oxen and Wood-Bison. 
By Caspar Whitney. Profusely Illus- 
trated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut 
Edges and Gilt Top, $3 50. 
This book is the result of a six months' trip 
from Edmonton, Alberta, northward through the 
Northwest Territory, into the Arctic Circle, and 
back, during the winter and spring of 1894-95. 
The complete story of this adventurous trip is 
told here for the first time. The descriptions of 
the hunting of the wood-bison and the musk - ox, 
the two rarest kinds of big game in North Amer- 
ica, will prove of the utmost interest to hunters 
and sportsmen in general, but to the general 
reader the narrative of Mr. Whitney's journey, 
the enormous difficulties overcome by him dur- 
ing his 2800 miles of snow-shoeing and sledging, 
will no doubt appeal most strongly. The whole 
trip was a piece of daring adventure, and Mr. 
Whitney's familiar, confidential style of describ- 
ing his many trials and adventures makes the 
book not only instructive but highly interesting 
as a narrative. 



NEW TORK AND LONDON: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

B^~ The above work is for sale by all booksellers, or will be 
mailed by the publishers, postage prepaid, on receipt of the price 



A SPORTING PILGRIMAGE 



Riding to Hounds, Golf, Rowing, Football, Click- 
et, Club and University Athletics. Studies in 
English Sport, Past and Present. By Caspar 
Whitney. Copiously illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, 
Ornamental, S3 50. 

Sport makes manly boys and gentle men ; quickens 
the judgment; puts pluck in the heart, and strength 
in the body. Until comparatively recent years we of 
the United States have been too much occupied with 
the work of building up a great nation to give any se- 
rious thought to play, but in England sports of various 
kinds flourished before America was discovered. Thus 
we turn for our precedents to the old country, where 
every game, save lacrosse, was cradled. To thorough- 
ly understand the value and the extent of modern games 
and sports in the United States, it is necessary, there- 
fore, to study past traditions and present systems, both 
here and in Europe; and no other writer of the pres- 
ent day has made so careful a study, or kept himself 
so thoroughly in touch with the best elements of sport 
as Mr. Whitney. He is not only a student of amateur 
sport, whose pen is continually being used in behalf of 
sport for sport's sake; but he has the great advantage 
of practical experience in almost every branch of sport, 
extending from those of his college days to the hunt- 



NEW YORK AND LONDON : 

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers 

6®= The above work is for sale by all booksellers, or will be 
sent by the publishers, postage prepaid, on receipt of the price. 



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